NYT: Why Republicans Cant Do Health Care: A Party Divided Against Itself w/o a POTUS to Lead

[ehrnst]

In the long Reagan era, the Republican Party was, in effect, the party of the health care status quo — bending to accept certain expansions of the welfare state (S-CHIP, a prescription drug benefit in Medicare) in order to forestall a larger government takeover of health insurance.

By the late 2000s, however, the decline in employer-provided coverage and the steady rise of health care costs made status-quo politics untenable: Too many workers who made too much to qualify for Medicaid were unable to afford insurance. Meanwhile, over the same period, Republicans were winning more working-class votes, which meant that their own constituents increasingly stood to benefit from a coverage-expanding health care reform.

This created a strong incentive for Republicans to accept one. But there were still stronger incentives to resist, because the party’s limited-government ideology was hostile to increased spending, and many of its strongest interest groups stood to lose out from reform. So resist the G.O.P. did — sometimes by embracing a more libertarian vision of health care, but more often by incoherently and opportunistically attacking whatever the Democrats proposed.

This strategy was ultimately a policy failure, and it left Obamacare an established fact. At which point the G.O.P. was boarded and seized by candidate Trump, who clearly grasped the political logic of reconciling his party to some form of coverage expansion, even though he lacked an interest in actually hammering out the details. His campaign thus pointed ahead to a likely future in which the G.O.P. accepts a health care subsidy for the working class, without addressing all the internal reasons that the party can’t agree on what that subsidy should look like.

Those internal tensions that have given us the botch that is the House G.O.P.’s Obamacare alternative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/why-republicans-cant-do-health-care.html

[Cosmocat]

1. There is no greater example of just how stupid this country is than the ACA

The ACA is THE REPUBLICAN VERSION OF HEALTH CARE REFORM.

its what they put forward in the early 90s when Bill and Hillary were trying to get universal coverage, it was what their candidate for POTUS in 2012 implemented in his state as governor.

BUT, not a single republican voted for it, the spent 7 years saying it was the worst thing to every happen to this country and the brain dead population of this country saw fit to give them the biggest mid term congressional win in our history for them rabidly running against THEIR version of health care reform!

NOW, the dog has finally gotten its tail only to realize it is attached to his own ass.

Being the simple minded dolts they are, for 7 years they just though bah we will repeal it!

THEN, the simple reality of the political damage it cause to pull the plug on so many people who finally got health care coverage dawned on them, and they now face the painful reality that they actually have to come up with something to replace it with.

They got nothing, because ACA is the baseline of the most workable of all bad ideas short of universal.

AND, still 1/3 of the country will remain doggedly loyal to them and 1/3 of the country will passively go along with them because "both parties are the same."