Talking points
Obamacare: A backdoor attempt to repeal
Republicans tried and failed many times last year to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, said Paul Waldman in WashingtonPost.com. Now the Trump administration is back at it, with a strategy that is “utterly spectacular in its legal and political foolishness.” At the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department announced last week it won’t defend the constitutionality of the ACA as the law faces a legal challenge from 20 Republican-run states. In a radical argument the Trump administration now endorses, the states contend that because last year’s Republican tax bill repealed tax penalties for failing to buy health insurance—the so-called individual mandate—the rest of Obamacare is unconstitutional. If Republicans succeed in court, they will kill the law’s most popular provision, requiring insurers to cover millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions at no extra charge. “If Democrats don’t repeat that sentence a thousand times a day between now and November, they’re nuts.”
Actually, the pre-existing condition requirement was a mistake, said Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post. Just 5 percent of the population consumes 50 percent of health-care dollars. “The unfairness is obvious.” Why should healthy people pay the same premiums as those with serious illnesses? When states wrest back the job of regulating health care from the federal government, they can help insurers defray the cost of covering the chronically ill without all the bureaucratic nonsense. Obamacare deserves to die, said Stephen Moore in the Boston Herald. Premiums on the exchanges keep soaring, by 32 percent this year for the cheapest plans, while national health costs have grown from 17.2 percent of GDP to 18.3 percent, and 30 million people remain uninsured. “Has there ever been a bigger public policy flop?”
If Republicans think they can do better, they should “pass a damn law,” said Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post. But even after Trump took office, congressional Republicans “chickened out” of repealing Obamacare. “Why?” Because “Obamacare’s major provisions were quite popular,” especially its safeguards for pre-existing conditions, which protect an estimated 52 million Americans. “Republican lawmakers decided they didn’t want to be known as the party that rips insurance away from asthmatics and cancer survivors.” Instead, they’re hoping to “destroy” Obamacare through a legal backdoor. That’s “the coward’s way out.”