Republicans serve appetizer, complain that you haven't praised the whole meal - By Philip Bump
To hear House Speaker Paul D. Ryan tell it, we are all misunderstanding the scale of the Republican plan to replace Obamacare. During his sleeves-rolled-up presentation last week, he explained, not for the first time, that the American Health Care Act is simply part one of a three-part plan.
Those parts? Part one, as noted, is the AHCA. In part two, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price takes a number of executive actions, such as deregulating the marketplace. Part three, Congress passes more bills to flesh things out. Simple enough.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer reminded the assembled press corps that the AHCA was only part one of the plan, and he did so for a very specific purpose: to undercut the problematic (for Republicans) Congressional Budget Office analysis of the AHCA that came out Monday.
“CBO coverage estimates are consistently wrong,” Spicer said, “and, more importantly, do not take into consideration the three — the comprehensive nature of this three-pronged plan to repeal and replace Obamacare with the American Health Care Act.” In other words, the CBO’s analysis looked only at part one of the plan, not all three parts — and, therefore, its analysis should be considered suspect.
In theory, that is a fair argument. In reality, though, there are two very good reasons that the CBO didn’t include those other two prongs. The first is that the CBO evaluates legislation, not multipart strategies involving executive action. The second reason, however, is the more problematic one: The other two prongs don’t really exist in any meaningful way.
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