Influential members of Congress are supporting reenacting a health care bill that passed Congress last January called the Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015, or H.R. 3762. That bill would have repealed Obamacare’s tax hikes, Medicaid expansion, and insurance exchange subsidies. But critically, this partial repeal bill does not get rid of Obamacare’s tens of thousands of pages of insurance regulations, which are responsible for the law’s drastic premium hikes. If Republicans pass a replica of H.R. 3762 in the first quarter of 2017, they will be making a potentially catastrophic mistake that might make it impossible for them to replace Obamacare later on. To avoid those pitfalls, they need to wipe out Obamacare’s costliest insurance regulations in the new partial repeal bill and retain about three-fifths of Obamacare’s tax hikes to create fiscal room for the replacement.
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About 6.4 million people have signed up for health insurance next year under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration said Wednesday, as people rushed to purchase plans regardless of Republican promises that the law will be repealed within months.
The new sign-ups — an increase of 400,000 over a similar point last year — mean the health care coverage of millions of consumers could be imperiled by one of the first legislative actions of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Hundreds of thousands of other people who took no action will be automatically re-enrolled by the federal government in the same or similar plans, officials said, and their coverage could be threatened as well. Consumers still have until the end of January to enroll.
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The news is all full of supporters of the Affordable Care Act warning about how the health insurance system will collapse if, as various Republican repeal programs propose, the “individual mandate” is immediately gutted while parts of the ACA briefly solider on. It’s not that the people issuing the warning aren’t correct. Repeal of the individual mandate without some immediate replacement will clearly reduce the stability of whatever markets would otherwise remain as the ACA continues its death march. It’s just that many of them are hypocrites.
It was the Obama administration and supporters of the ACA who essentially gutted the individual mandate.
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Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner on why she supports President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Tom Price as the next Health Secretary.
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Do you think it is a bit strange that after 7 years, Republicans in Congress still don’t have a replacement plan for Obamacare? Or that they now tell us that developing one will take 3 or 4 more years. And of course, once they have a plan it will take state governments and insurance companies two or three more years to phase it in. So, we are looking at a decade’s delay. That’s if we are lucky.
Suppose the tables were turned. If Obamacare were a Republican reform and Democrats controlled Congress, how long would it take the Democrats to come up with a better plan? They’d do it in a heartbeat. They would do it by doing what Democrats are traditionally good at: putting ideology aside and finding solutions that make all the major stakeholders better off.
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With Republicans controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue next year, they have a great, and rare, opportunity for reform. The question now is whether Donald Trump and a new congressional generation can enact center-right reform solutions, and the first proving ground will be ObamaCare. If Republicans don’t repeal the law immediately, the danger is that the natural inertia of Congress takes over and nothing changes. But the more time they put between repeal and replace, the more the danger will grow. Now’s the chance to show they can reform the entitlement state with solutions that improve the daily lives of Americans.
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