The Republican Health-Care Lie Is Collapsing - By Jonathan Chait
Republicans have justified their health-care rollback as a “rescue mission” to save America from a “failing” law. Their insistence that the Affordable Care Act is collapsing on its own is demonstrably false. But even if it were correct, the case is a non sequitur, because the most significant changes in the law have nothing to do with the alleged failure of Obamacare. Throughout the health-care debate, Republicans have managed to submerge this disconnected, obfuscatory rhetoric. But now the lie is finally coming to the surface, and the willingness of Republicans to indulge it is dissolving.
Obamacare has two different programs for covering the uninsured. Medicaid covers the poorest ones (with incomes below 133 percent of the poverty line). Those above that line can get tax credits to cover their insurance, which is sold on exchanges that are regulated to ensure people with expensive medical needs can’t be excluded or charged higher prices. When Republicans insist Obamacare is “failing,” they mean the exchanges. In reality, only some states have trouble with exchanges, and analysts believe the main cause is deliberate sabotage by the Trump administration, which Trump himself has boasted about openly.
The Republican bill does have some measures to shore up the exchanges. It would authorize payments to insurers that have disproportionately sick customers — payments included in the Obamacare law but which Republicans have managed to block — and create a $100 billion stability fund. These measures have bipartisan support. If they were passed as a stand-alone bill, the exchanges would be fine.
“It’s unfortunate that our Democratic colleagues refused to work with us in a serious way to comprehensively address Obamacare’s failures,” says a pious-sounding Mitch McConnell.
But, of course, Democrats do support measures to address Obamacare’s failures. They support the exact steps in McConnell’s bill. What they don’t support is the other parts of the bill: mainly a half-trillion-dollar tax cut for wealthy investors, offset with cuts in Medicaid and the tax credits. While those policies may advance long-standing conservative policy goals, they have no plausible relation to the alleged “collapse” of Obamacare.
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