Almost No One Likes the GOPs Repeal and Delay Plan for Obamacare
Almost No One Likes the GOP’s ‘Repeal and Delay’ Plan for Obamacare
Zoë Carpenter
The Nation
The strategy has been dubbed “repeal and delay.” Republicans could eliminate major pieces of the law within a matter of weeks. But party leaders want to postpone the date the rollback goes into effect, by a couple of years, to prevent disruption in people’s insurance coverage (read, to protect themselves from blowback in the 2018 elections). In the meantime, Republicans promise, they’ll pass a replacement—“something terrific,” to quote Donald Trump.
Democrats have made it very clear that they have no interest in cooperating later to pass a replacement bill. But they aren’t the only ones opposed to “repeal and delay.” Only one in five Americans supports the strategy, according to a poll released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And a growing number of moderate and conservative voices chimed in this week to register unease. “I don’t think we can just repeal Obamacare and say we’re going to get the answer two years from now,” Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton said Thursday on MSNBC. “Health care is a very complex issue. We haven’t coalesced around a solution for six years, in part because it is so complicated. Kicking the can down the road for a year or two years is not going to make it any easier to solve.” Three other Republican senators have expressed doubts about repealing the law before proposing a replacement. (A plan to use the repeal legislation to defund Planned Parenthood may further erode support for it; GOP senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins tried to remove a similar provision in an Obamacare repeal bill last year.)
Objections to a quick repeal are also coming from Republican leaders in states with a lot to lose if federal dollars for the Medicaid expansion are yanked back. Ohio Governor John Kasich said Thursday that he wants “to know what’s going to happen to all those people who find themselves left out in the cold.” In Michigan, where more than 642,300 people have signed up for the state’s version of the Medicaid expansion since 2014, Republican Governor Rick Snyder defended the program in a recent interview, calling it a “successful” model. Arizona Governor Doug Doucey has also urged against repealing the law before a viable replacement is in place; about 400,000 of his constituents could lose coverage if federal funds for the Medicaid expansion disappear. Montana House speaker Austin Knudsen voiced similar concerns last month.
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