February 9, 2014

The Affordable Care Act and Why Compromise with the Republicans is Counter Productive.

I was reading this column by New York times columnist Ross Douthat

"Leaving work Behind"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/douthat-leaving-work-behind.html?ref=opinion

"That big number prompted Republicans to recycle their predictions that the health care law would be a “job killer.” As liberals retorted, this is not exactly right: These would be working hours freely given up, not jobs lost in huge Obamacare-induced layoffs. Any health care reform worthy of the name would have some version of this effect: If you weaken the link between insurance and employment, workers will have one less reason to stay at a job they dislike. And it’s easy to envision cases where the ability to reduce one’s working hours would be an unmitigated good — for ailing near-retirees, for parents of young children.

At the same time, though, the design of Obamacare — Medicaid expansion, subsidies for comprehensive rather than catastrophic coverage, and then the way the subsidy disappears if you get a raise or take a higher-paying job — makes the work disincentive much more substantial than it would be under, say, a conservative alternative that offers everyone a flat credit to buy a catastrophic plan."

He pretty much says that the Affordable Care Act disincentive to work and he ends with a paragraph about conservatives and the dignity of work.

On the conservative side, things are somewhat clearer. There are libertarians who like the basic income idea, but only as a substitute for the existing welfare state, not as a new expansion. Both “rugged individualist” right-wingers and more communitarian conservatives tend to see work as essential to dignity, mobility and social equality, and see its decline as something to be fiercely resisted.

This post is not really about the Douthat column, because he is clearly full of crap, because he is against the American worker to have the freedom not to be stuck with a crappy job just for the health insurance. It is about how trying to compromise with the Republicans is counterproductive. I'm sure you all know that the Affordable Care Act was actually base on Mitt Romney's healthcare plan when he was governor of Massachusetts. It was first pitched by the conservative think thank, the Heritage foundation. Now that Obama adopted the idea it is now a bad socialist idea. The Ross Douthat column I posted is a clear example of this.

Democrats need to try to persuade the public with their own ideas instead of serving up warmed over conservative ideas in the name of compromise, because the Republicans are just going to reject them anyway.