So it’s widely known that the ACA didn’t contain everything that the Dems and Obama wanted, and they compromised to get what is now Obamacare, which most people agree is failing (the degree to which is up for debate). But clearly the current law is far from perfect, so there was an effort to replace it. Why replace it with a bill that is just another compromise only to end up in the same spot we are in now?? Kicking the can or putting a band-aid on it is not a good outcome. Let’s allow the ACA to fail entirely, then the people will have no choice but to accept the new law and hopefully we can find a good long-term solution.
DJT could take a steaming dump on his desk during a live press conference, and PA would rationalize it as a brilliant marketing ploy to drive more sales of Oxypowder from the Breitbart store.
Haha good effort GOP. Hell of an opposition party, but clearly bankrupt of any useful ideas.
Love that the next step was “just repeal” and a bunch of republican senators were like gtfo. If you couldn’t come up with anything after seven years, it’s not likely two more were going to help.
The GOP has plenty of useful ideas, the problem is they have really become two parties with very different ideals operating under the same name. The biggest difference between the republican effort now and the Obamacare process is that democrats had a very popular president in the WH who could tell members of congress to sit down and shut up. Being neither popular nor effective, Trump can’t control congress, so the nut jobs in the party are free to do whatever they want.
The problem for those Republicans is that it is politically very damaging to remove benefits that have already been granted. Their objective is to scale back the healthcare subsidy program. However, this is difficult to accomplish, due to the political consequences. The policy is path dependent - Obamacare would obviously not pass today in Congress. So in a world without ACA, State 1 would dominate State 2. However, in a world with ACA, State 2 dominates State 1. This problem exists in all sorts of government programs.
I’m not so sure. Of course the republican led congress would never pass some of the mandates of ACA such as mandatory drug treatment coverage, women’s benefits, and of course the expansion of Medicaid. However, the heart of Obamacare is the individual mandate i.e. the tool used to stop death spirals for high risk pools. The Republican tool was to use the excess funds gained from the Obamacare taxes to create a fund of some sort which would be made available to insurance companies to offset the costs of the high risk pools. In a neutral world without an FU Obama environment the individual mandate sounds more Republican that taxing the rich to fund private insurance companies.
Yes, but eventually he and Pelosi were able to tell the single payer folks to sit down and shut up and they really had no choice but to comply. Trump lacks the popularity to be able to do that.