This type of 'pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it' mentality
birthed Obamacare, and is the reason the conservative base increasingly
despises their party.
Speaker
Paul Ryan has scheduled the American Health Care Act (AHCA) for a vote in the
full House on Thursday. Passing the bill through the House will be
difficult, and through the Senate even more so.
The AHCA
does not repeal Obamacare, which Congress voted to do only 14 months ago and
Republicans spent the last seven years promising. The present bill, offered a
mere two weeks ago and hustled through committees without time to fully
consider its implications, is typical of the top-down, take-it-or-leave-it legislative
blackmail characteristic of so many ill-considered attempts at lawmaking. In
the unlikely event it is signed into law, it may well become a new
“read-my-lips” broken pledge, an anchor around the president’s and Congress’s
hold on power.
Donald Trump’s
presidential nomination was as much a rebuke to the Republican Party as his
general election was to the Washington establishment, yet Ryan and the
legislative leadership of the party seem to have taken no notice.
They
still believe the proper method of governing is to huddle in a back room with a
handful of lobbyists and craft complex legislation in secret before springing
it on their members in a hail of empty promises and naked threats. This type of
“pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it” mentality birthed Obamacare, and almost
passed comprehensive immigration reform. It is the reason the conservative base
increasingly despises their party.
Ryan’s AHCA retains 10 of 12 major mandates Obamacare placed on insurance companies. The primary mandate is requiring that insurance companies not penalize people for pre-existing conditions. While that sounds like a lovely idea, it enables people to put off buying insurance until they get sick, thereby destroying the whole idea of insurance and driving prices through the roof. To help pay for the costs Obamacare created and the AHCA continues, the bill changes Obamacare subsidies into tax credits, which are available even if one doesn’t pay income taxes.
The AHCA
eliminates the individual mandate to buy insurance, but allows insurance
companies to charge an extra 30 percent to people who allow coverage to lapse.
This 30 percent is an implicit penalty for pre-existing conditions, but it is a
pittance compared with what the coverage will actually cost, which will be made
up by charging others more, causing them to drop their coverage.
At least
requiring everyone to sign up, while constitutionally loathsome, made sense
given the mandate to cover pre-existing conditions, but the AHCA doesn’t do
that and thus is likely to accelerate the death spiral of healthy people
dropping coverage. If this argument seems familiar, it is because the
Republican Party has been making it for the past seven years, but now seems
inexplicably eager to switch sides on a winning issue.
Republicans Already Passed Obamacare’s Repeal
On
January 8, 2016, President Obama vetoed a repeal of Obamacare’s budgetary
provisions passed under reconciliation. Ryan said at the time, “Next year, if
we’re sending this bill to a Republican president, it will get signed into
law.” Presumably Ryan said “if” to mean “if I had a Republican president,” not
“if I feel like holding another vote,” which apparently now he doesn’t.
If
Republicans pass this bill and take ownership of Obamacare, they will be
annihilated.
