Wednesday, April 19, 2017

GOP Can't Quit Obamacare

I know which one Elise is.

Now, when it comes to Obamacare, there are generally two types of Republicans: ones who despise everything about it, and ones who understand nothing about it. The first group are libertarians who want to get rid of the law root-and-branch. They don't think the federal government should play any part in helping people get coverage, or telling insurers what that has to be. Instead, they'd like to go back to a world where the sick are mostly on their own, and insurance companies are mostly free to discriminate against them.

The second group are so-called moderates who oppose Obamacare entirely because of politics, not policy. Which is to say that they attack the unpopular parts of the law, like penalizing people for not getting insurance, at the same time that they support the popular parts, like banning insurance companies from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions. What they don't get, though, is that you can't have the latter without the former.

Actually, I lied. I have no idea which group she's in because she won't give an opinion or hold a town hall. The choices are between venal and stupid. I'll be charitable and assume that she's in the stupid group. 

That brings us to the GOP's real problem. It's that a lot of Republicans secretly kind of like Obamacare, or at least they like what it does. They don't want to get rid of the way it's covered sick people or expanded coverage or let kids stay on their parent's insurance until they're 26 years old. The only thing they do want to change — well, other than the name and the individual mandate — is the way that premiums and deductibles have continued to march ever higher. But that, whether they realize it or not, is actually an argument that Obamacare hasn't gone far enough. That we need bigger subsidies so people can buy better coverage that doesn't make them pay as much out-of-pocket.

Somehow I don't think Paul Ryan of the Freedom Caucus is going to go for that idea. 

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