Repeal without replacing?

There is much jeering over the failure of U.S. Republicans to repeal Obamacare. And not unreasonably. But let’s work on our aim.

President Trump has attracted a great deal of scorn, partly on general principles and partly because like many incoming presidents he went in thinking he had “won the election” and a bunch of nothings had somehow floated into Congress or even been swept in by his tailwind.

In fact the GOP in 2015 reached a level of strength in the House of Representatives they hadn’t seen since 1929, Herbert Hoover’s first term. So Trump marched into the GOP caucus, told them what to do and marched out. And they didn’t. So much for the art of the deal.

The U.S. has an effective separation of powers and its legislators know it. Bullying and patronizing them is a self-inflicted wound; Carter made the same mistake. (Trump is now digging himself a much bigger hole by assigning his son-in-law to “fix government with business ideas.” People, if government were a like a business it wouldn’t be government. How do you not know that?)

The press are also doing the “Republicans divided, on fire” jeer they always produce when the GOP has internal debates instead of chanting a party line. And Trump seems to be jeering at everyone as usual, including both wings of his own party.

His partisans, and Republican partisans generally, have been consoling themselves with the taunt that the Democrats now “own” Obamacare. In one sense they always did, since they thought it up and pushed it through against bitter Republican opposition. In another sense they do not, since Republicans have a majority in both Houses and thus “own” not only what they pass but what they fail to repeal.

So let’s turn the raspberrygenerator to them, spraying in passing modern governments unable to figure out how not to interfere in people’s lives. Including Canada’s Liberal cabinet and Parliamentary majority who apparently can’t figure out how not to ban marijuana. You get funny looks for suggesting government develops a perverse momentum unknown to many academic theorists and practitioners. But it does, so here the jeering should become a lot more general.

The obvious thing to do with Obamacare is what I urged the Reform Party to do years ago with various dysfunctional and unaffordable social programs: take it out behind the barn and kill it with an axe. But too many House Republicans were determined to replace Obamacare with other Obamacare. They were not willing to consider, even incapable of imagining, simply getting rid of it.

To do so would not have been satisfactory. The U.S. health-care system was a horrendous mess before Obamacare and not, as many Canadians fondly suppose, because it was a “free market” system but because of decades of meddling, from declaring company health plans not taxable to Medicaid and Medicare in the 1960s. But as C.S. Lewis says, sometimes when things go wrong in life it’s like a math problem; until you go back and fix the original mistake you will never get anywhere. Layering error on error just won’t work.

So a hearty wuk wuk wuk to legislators who can’t imagine peeling back layers of error methodically. Oh, and to voters, here’s yours: WUK WUK WUK!!!

It’s bigger because the main problem is Obamacare gave people things they had not earned. That’s why it’s unaffordable. Forbidding insurance companies from excluding pre-existing conditions, and forcing them to subsidize high-risk older people by overcharging low-risk younger ones made a mockery of matching premiums to actuarial probability. In short, it forbade applying insurance principles to insurance.

If you’re wondering how politicians could fail to know that, give them credit. There’s no limit to the basic economic principles many avoid knowing. But a lot of Republicans do know it, which is why they opposed Obamacare to begin with. Unfortunately once voters get free money, they start feeling entitled to their entitlements after roughly five nanoseconds. And then politicians must talk and act like fools to avoid saying “You didn’t earn it and can’t have it because we can’t afford it.”

There are two solutions here ultimately. One is to wait until Obamacare goes bankrupt and takes the U.S. government with it, which appeals to foolish Republicans unaware they were not elected to sacrifice the national interest for partisan gain, and anyway, if disaster happens on your watch, you own it.

The other is to heed the words of Ralph Klein’s first finance minister, Jim Dinning, that “you cannot cross a chasm in two leaps,” and undo old mistakes without adding new ones.

Anyone who won’t do so deserves to be jeered. Even if it requires a 360-degree field of fire.