A Republican Health Care Bill in Search of a Problem - By the NYT Editorial Board

[DonViejo]

Republican leaders in the House have been huddling over the last few days in a frantic search for enough votes to win passage of their proposed revision of Obamacare, in the process making an already flawed bill even worse. One measure of their desperation was a cynical last-minute provision that would shift Medicaid costs from New York’s rural and suburban counties to the state government, pleasing upstate Republicans who represent those counties but reducing coverage provided by the state.

Such wheeling and dealing has done nothing to improve a bill that would rip coverage from 24 million people over 10 years, leaving more Americans uninsured than if Congress simply repealed the Affordable Care Act, and inspiring an official of the American College of Physicians, which represents 148,000 doctors and medical students, to say Link to tweet
?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">on Monday that he had “never seen a bill that will do more harm to health.”

Link to tweet

It also reflects a fundamental reality: Unlike President Barack Obama, whose clear objective was to expand access to medical care, the Republicans have no coherent idea or shared vision of what they want to achieve and what problem they mean to solve.

Do they want to cover nearly as many as are covered under the A.C.A.? A few senators, like Susan Collins of Maine and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, say they do, but a majority from the party are not willing to spend the money that would be needed to do that. Or do they want to significantly reduce government spending and regulation of health care, leaving Americans to navigate the free market on their own? Conservatives like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina are arguing for that, but the rest of the congressional Republicans do not want to go down this treacherous path.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/opinion/a-republican-health-care-bill-in-search-of-a-problem.html?emc=edit_th_20170322&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284

[Proud Liberal Dem]

1. A simple repeal would be bad enough for all kinds of reasons

Republicans really have no good plan to replace ACA without unnecessarily harming a lot of people. We would all be better off if they move on to acceptance stage and work with Democrats in a genuinely bipartisan fashion to find areas of agreement on places where ACA can be improved to work better. Sadly, that will probably not happen until Republicans are swept out office en masse.