USA TODAY International Edition
Our view: Kill Obamacare? GOP still has no replacement plan
Ever since the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Republicans have been hellbent on either repealing the measure in Congress or striking it down in courts.
Their latest effort to overturn the decade-old law, which the Trump administration joined this week with a legal brief calling for the entire ACA's demise, combines the two approaches.
It reasons that if Congress can repeal a tiny portion of the law, which it did by ending penalties for those without insurance, sympathetic judges would then repeal the rest, which has happened at the district court level in Texas.
Call it what it is: a tag-team assault on the ACA by conservatives in Congress and in robes.
At risk are popular provisions that guarantee coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, allow children to remain on parents' policies until age 26, expand Medicaid eligibility for low-income adults, and create insurance marketplaces for workers who aren't employed by government or medium-to-large companies.
The ACA has its flaws, but a fundamental overhaul is not in the cards. Progressive Democrats' Medicare-forAll proposals are too expensive and would blow up insurance-based coverage that many workers are satisfied with. With no credible alternative, the options are improving the ACA or returning to an untenable situation before it existed.
While President Donald Trump prattled Wednesday about some forthcoming, unspecified offering that would be “far better than Obamacare” and make the GOP “the party of great health care,” he has no such plan.
Such a plan has never existed for one simple reason: The ACA largely is that plan. Its basic architecture was devised in the 1990s as a conservative alternative to the proposals of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Later, it would be put into practice by Republican Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, and appropriated by Democrat Barack Obama when he was a presidential candidate.
Ironically, and cynically, the biggest winner from the renewed effort to kill Obamacare is Democratic lawmakers. With Trump off the hook on Russian collusion, they could hardly restrain their glee this week as they attacked the president and unveiled plans to expand coverage.
Whether the Supreme Court would throw out all of Obamacare, after previously finding it to be constitutional, is doubtful. A strategy of judges working with lawmakers on a partisan goal would undermine Americans' faith in their judiciary. But the biggest losers of all, should this effort succeed, would be the millions of Americans who would be stripped of their health coverage.