Obamacare 2.0 is the largest Republican welfare program in the history of the Republican Party. That has a lot of implications, cascading effects,” Brooks warned.
“By way of example, it undermines the work ethic. It encourages more and more Americans to live off the hard work of others. Obamacare 2.0, because of this welfare provision over time, is going to dramatically increase the need to raise taxes or borrow more money to pay for, if past experiences are any indication, what will be escalating welfare costs.
.. if this bill passes with this huge welfare program, all of a sudden, you are converting tens of millions of voters who now are self-reliant into welfare dependents – thus making elections about who can deliver the most welfare for me to help me with my health insurance premium,” he said.
“That’s going to have a huge electoral impact. That’s going to turn America over to the Bernie Sanders socialist wing of American society. Quite frankly, it may be the death knell for the free enterprise system that has helped make America the greatest economic power in the world,” he warned.
.. “We’re not doing what we were sent here to do: cut premium costs, make health care more affordable on the one hand, and on the other hand, to create a huge new welfare program that, in effect, duplicates the structure of Obamacare,”
.. Marlow noted that the bill is “overwhelmingly unpopular” with voters, scoring as low as 17 percent support in polls, but seems to enjoy vastly disproportionate support from the House Republican caucus.
.. “The simplest and smartest thing to do would have been to pull up the Obamacare repeal bill that passed the Republican House and passed the Republican Senate two years ago that was vetoed by President Obama,”
Cruz suggests ignoring Senate parliamentarian for ObamaCare repeal
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is suggesting that the GOP could ignore interpretations of the Senate parliamentarian if it means sending a full repeal of ObamaCare to the president’s desk.
“At the end of the day, the Senate parliamentarian is an employee of the Senate. Virtually every Republican campaigned promising full repeal,”
.. While the parliamentarian’s role is strictly advisory, Senate leaders rarely ignore his or her advice.
Erick Erickson: Don’t Try to Fix Obamacare. Abolish It.
Republicans ran advertisements noting they had voted 70 or more times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and they would do it as soon as they had control of Congress and the White House.
Voters gave them just that. And now Republicans, who had used the word “repeal” like a meditation chant, act like the proverbial dog that caught the car. The plan they all liked in 2015 — one that would have ended the law’s mandates, subsidies and Medicaid expansion — would not pass today.
.. Mr. Trump’s voters supported a man who promised a government-run health care plan that would provide universal coverage. In other words, he promised more than Obamacare. For that matter, Mr. Trump promised more government involvement in health care than Hillary Clinton did.
.. Mr. Trump’s voters want Obamacare, but they want Mr. Trump’s gold-plated branding on it.
.. Democrats were far more focused on expanding coverage and ensuring every American could get insurance than they were on making coverage affordable.
.. Instead, they should focus on cost.
.. Increasing competition and choice would lower prices for all kinds of insurance.
.. Watching many Americans demand repeal, while voting for a man who promised a government-run, universal coverage solution, only increases politicians’ cynicism about the American voter.
Repeal and Compete
Modern conservatism, at least in its pre-Donald Trump incarnation, evolved to believe in a marriage of Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman, in which the wisdom of tradition and the wisdom of free markets were complementary ideas.
.. The essence of Cassidy-Collins, and the reason that many Republicans don’t like it, is that it isn’t actually a full Obamacare replacement. Instead, it’s a federalist compromise. It lets individual state governments decide whether they want to stick with Obamacare or not, which would mean that the law would remain intact in most blue states for the time being, while redder states would have the opportunity to turn roughly the same amount of money (95 percent) to a different end.
.. That end would look like one of the more plausible conservative alternatives to Obamacare: a subsidy to cover the cost of a catastrophic health insurance plan, plus a directly funded health savings account to cover primary care.
.. The peril is that there would be too wide a gap between what the money in your health savings account covers and what you need before your catastrophic coverage kicks in. In which case many people with consistent health care costs for chronic problems would rack up impossible medical bills in short order.