PENCE BACKS 'REPEAL ONLY'
HEALTH-CARE PLAN, Republican
Congress struggles to fulfill vow to voters, 7/11/17, WND
With the Republican-led Senate
struggling to pass a plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare as the August
recess approaches, Vice President Mike Pence raised once again the alternative
of passing a “repeal only” bill and working on a replacement bill later.
“We believe if they can’t pass this
carefully crafted repeal and replace bill – we do those two things simultaneously
– we ought to just repeal only and then have enough time built into that
legislation to craft replacement legislation,” Pence told talk-radio host Rush
Limbaugh Tuesday.
Last month, President Trump said
much the same, tweeting: “If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they
are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later
date!”
The Republican leadership Tuesday
announced the August recess will be delayed two weeks to give more time to pass
a repeal-and-replace bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected
to unveil a revised bill Thursday after the Congressional Budget Office
assessed the initial version would leave 22 million more Americans
uninsured by 2026.
But, as
WND reported, the CBO, the bipartisan federal
agency that provides budget and economic information and assessment to Congress
— has a history of inaccurate forecasts that typically fail to account for the
impact of market forces. Critics argue the CBO does not score legislation
dynamically, ignoring growth that results from tax cuts and the reduced growth
that results from tax increases. And the scoring of the Senate health-care bill
does not take into account the millions of healthy Americans who, with the
Obamacare mandate removed, would choose not to have health insurance.
Republican Sens. Rand Paul of
Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are among the
senators who favor a “clean” repeal bill as an alternative.
Paul has called the Senate bill
“Obamacare-lite,” and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, called it “far short of repeal,”
contending it “keeps the Democrats’ broken system intact.” They remind
Republicans they ran in 2016 on repealing Obamacare “root and branch.”
In the Times’ analysis column “The
Upshot,” writer Margot Sanger-Katz disputed the contention of “repeal only”
proponents that “the status quo” could “float along until a new political
compromise arrived”
The theory, she said, “is that the
repeal bill would come with a one- or two-year fuse, and that the looming
explosion would compel lawmakers to compromise and pass something else in a
hurry.”
She argued the CBO has scored
what “partial repeal” would look like: 18 million people would lose
insurance coverage in the first year and 32 million in a decade. Over the
course of that decade, CBO concluded, the average insurance premium would
double. She also doesn’t believe increased pressure would bring lawmakers
closer to compromise.
“The very Republicans most enthusiastic
about a repeal-only strategy seem less interested in pursuing a separate,
costly replacement provision,” she wrote.
But Sasse proposes in his “repeal
only” proposal “a year-long implementation delay to give comfort to Americans
currently on Obamacare that a replacement plan will be enacted before
expiration.”
In a letter to President Trump
espousing his alternative, Sasse pointed out that with “one exception, every
member of this Senate majority – moderate and conservative – has explicitly
endorsed and/or already voted to repeal ObamaCare, most recently on December 3,
2015.”
If there is no agreement on the
Senate bill, he said, the senators should immediately vote again on H.R. 3762,
the December 2015 Obamacare repeal legislation that the Congress passed but
President Obama vetoed.
What makes reconciliation so tricky,
she said, is that reconciliation bills must contain only subject matter that
has a direct budgetary impact.
She favors repealing first and
replacing later, noting the December 2015 bill contains a two-year phaseout of
significant parts of Obamacare, which would allow Republicans to discuss,
debate and deliberate on what a replace plan should look like.
Work with Democrats?
Privately, senators and aides said
McConnell remains well short of the 50 votes needed to start debate on the
bill, Politico
reported Tuesday. McConnell has urged senators to
use the bill’s open amendment process to alter it to suit their concerns,
according to senators and aides.
Cruz and Mike Lee, R-Utah, have
proposed an amendment that would allow the sale of inexpensive, deregulated
insurance plans for healthy subscribers. But Politico said the amendment is
fracturing Senate Republicans, with disagreements over its drafting threatening
to delay or even sink the bill.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., doesn’t
think Republicans can come up with an agreement and may need the support of
Democrats. “I think my view is it’s probably going to be dead,” McCain said of
the GOP bill. If Democrats are included, he said, it doesn’t mean “they control
it. It means they can have amendments considered. And even when they lose, then
they’re part of the process. That’s what democracy is supposed to be all
about.”
GOP accepting ‘Obamacare logic’
Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., a member of
the House Freedom Caucus who taught economics for 20 years, supports repeal
first and replace later.
He told
WND earlier this month he can’t
support the initial Senate bill because it concedes the faulty economic logic
that put Obamacare “in the ditch.”
“That Obamacare logic was just about
100 percent attention paid to coverage and no attention paid to the price of
health care. As a result, people were covered with gold-plated health insurance
policies, but no one could afford health coverage,” said Brat.
He says that’s exactly what
Republican voters expected after the 2016 elections, but they aren’t getting
it. “When you vote 50 times to repeal and then you tell the American people
you’re going to repeal and then you end up very close to Obamacare logic. That
is not good for the Republican brand,” said Brat. Brat is confident that if
repeal came first, there would be plenty of interest across the spectrum in
getting on board with the replacement bill. “Then you have the leverage to work
with the Democrats. There’s no shortage of people who want to add programs in
D.C. in the swamp, right? So you first repeal, and then the floodgates are open
to add. You can get as many votes as you want from any politician to say yes.
Politicians love to say yes. That would have been a brilliant move back in
January,” he said.
He is imploring his fellow
Republicans to proceed on the principles they constantly espouse about the
success of the free market. “If you believe in free markets and the standard
American package of free enterprise, etc., that will deliver the goods.
Everybody knows these eye surgeries that started out at $6,000 per eye are down
to $450 per eye to get your Tiger Woods eye surgery,” said Brat.
“That’s what the market can do if
you let it alone. If you let the government intervene, you end up with
Medicare, which is insolvent in 2034. You end up with Social Security, which is
insolvent for the kids in 2034. Twenty trillion dollars in debt, $100 trillion
in unfunded liabilities to those major programs, and we’re going to add more
government,” said Brat.
The key problem, he said, is
government interference in the health-care system. “Through government interference in
health care, politicians have joined with industry lobbyists to destroy the
health care market and the direct relationship between consumers and
providers,” wrote
Horowitz.
“After destroying health care with
third-party and fourth-party insurance payments supplanting direct payments,
they then destroyed health insurance, whereby most insurance is provided by the
government or paid for by employers, thereby placing individuals at a
tremendous disadvantage.
Not only do we no longer pay for our
own health care, the overwhelming majority of those third-party payments are
paid for by a fourth party: employers, government, or both.”
“In a functioning market, prices
reach an equilibrium between the desire of profit for providers and the desire
of consumers for the service,” Horowitz explained. “When consumers are paying
for a service with their own money, there is a limit to what they can and will
pay. This forces providers to innovate and cut costs to conform to the organic
market demand.
“No such organic market demand
exists when consumers don’t pay for their own product and all the money comes
from a third party, which is primarily subsidized by a fourth party. Not only
does this fail to lower costs, it encourages providers to charge even more,
because they know there is an open-ended spigot from government-sponsored debt
fueled by political pressure to keep the gravy train flowing.”
The problem is that Obamacare
inflated Medicare to include able-bodied workers up to 400 percent of the
poverty line, he explained. “The fight now, and the reason a lot
of moderate Republicans are scared is because under this bill it goes from 400
percent down to 350 percent,” Krauthammer said. “This is a marginal
retrenchment of what makes you eligible for Medicaid. And people are used to
what was. They don’t want to give it back. That’s the reason that Obamacare
repeal is in trouble.”
He said the country is not where it
was seven years ago. “It’s the reason that the left
usually wins, because when you hand out goodies since the New Deal, it is
extremely hard to bring them back. That’s the core issue here.”
“I think historically speaking we
are at the midpoint,” Krauthammer told guest host Chris Wallace on the Fox News
Channel’s “Special Report.” “We had seven years of Obamacare, a change in
expectations, and I would predict that in less than seven years, we will be in
a single-payer system.”
http://www.wnd.com/2017/07/pence-backs-repeal-only-health-care-plan/
