Republicans have no clue how to keep their promises on Obamacare
REPUBLICANS LAST week kicked off their dominance of Washington by vowing to push through an unpopular and unwise unraveling of the Affordable Care Act, an imperfect law that nevertheless has done much good. Scaling back the policy is “the first order of business,” Vice President-elect Mike Pence promised after a strategy meeting on Capitol Hill. At the same time, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) pledged that Republicans would not pull the rug out from under people currently benefiting from the plan.
How can Republicans keep both promises? Better not to ask them. They seem to have no clue.
Following last year’s election, Republicans first floated the idea of “repeal and delay” — that is, formally canceling large pieces of the law while delaying the phaseout for perhaps several years, giving Congress time to pass a replacement. At first blush, this sounds reasonable (if wrongheaded). It is in fact unworkable.
The ACA depends on private insurers participating in competitive state insurance marketplaces. Without government incentives, and with no reason to believe that their time and effort will pay off under a nebulous new policy down the road, insurers will not continue serving markets that are in any case set to disappear. To avoid a repeal-and-delay disaster, Republicans would have to pour money into Obamacare, a move they ardently opposed when the goal was fixing the program rather than tearing it down. Bottom line: Without a replacement plan passed and in place at the time of repeal, policy uncertainty will drive insurers to quit the markets and desert their patients.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-have-no-clue-how-to-keep-their-promises-on-obamacare/2017/01/07/a54920b8-d2d7-11e6-a783-cd3fa950f2fd_story.html?utm_term=.8c3d364ce68d&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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