Senate Republicans on Tuesday delayed a vote on their health-care bill until after the July 4 recess, and the timidity and opportunism of too many Senators suggest they may never get 50 GOP votes. We hope they understand that if they fail, Republicans will be entrusting their political health-care future to the brutal generosity of Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. The idea persists in some media and GOP ranks that if the Senate bill dies, this will produce a blossoming of bipartisanship. But if Republicans fail, Democrats will have zero political incentive to cooperate except on their policy terms. Americans know that Republicans run Congress and the White House, and that they promised to do something about the problems of ObamaCare. Do Republicans really believe voters in 2018 will blame GOP failure on the President who left town two years ago?
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For decades American conservatives have sought to restore meaning to the 10th Amendment, which recognizes the states’ right to manage their affairs free from Washington’s interference. Passing the Republican Senate’s health-care bill would represent historic progress toward that goal.
Governors and state legislatures ask Washington every year for the right to receive their Medicaid funds in the form of a block grant, which would give them autonomy to manage the spending as they see fit. The Senate bill, for the first time, would allow that.
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It’s not a stretch to say that ultimately, keeping Obamacare on the books will take us to a single-payer healthcare system.
Conversely, enactment of the Senate GOP healthcare legislation embraces a vision that empowers individuals and families to make their own healthcare decisions. It will move individuals and families away from government programs and toward private markets. While it doesn’t achieve all the policy goals that the free market movement would like, it takes a huge step in the right direction and puts the nation on a path toward a market-based, consumer-oriented healthcare system.
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You won’t hear this from the establishment media but the Senate’s ObamaCare repeal bill contains massive tax relief for middle class families.
When it was signed into law seven years ago, ObamaCare implemented a health care system with top-down, bureaucratic command and control. The government told you what insurance you must have. And what you cannot have.
ObamaCare suppressed individual choice, competition, and state flexibility, and imposed a long list of taxes on businesses and families.
Republican Senators now have the chance to repair this damage by passing the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA).
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But the core planks of the Senate Republicans’ health bill — the Better Care Reconciliation Act — borrow just as much from Democratic ideas as Obamacare borrowed from Republican ones.
The Senate bill’s plan to reform Medicaid by tying per-enrollee spending to medical inflation through 2025 and to consumer inflation thereafter was borrowed from a nearly identical 1995 proposal by President Bill Clinton. Indeed, the main difference between the Clinton proposal and the Republican one is that the Clinton proposal would have tied per-enrollee spending to growth in the gross domestic product. Historically, medical inflation has been higher than G.D.P. growth.
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