Why Does The GOP Need Its Own Version Of ObamaCare?

by JASmius



The Republican Congress has repealed it, didja notice, my Tea Party friends?  And now the latest fratricidal poke is that they didn't do it soon enough, that they should have done it a year ago, as soon as this Congress convened, to show that they were "serious" or something.  Repealing it now, by this line of "thought," is just "checking off a box".  Even though Red Barry's veto pen had more ink in it then than it does now, and he's got an inexhaustible supply.

Another perennial Tea Party criticism of congressional Republicans is that they always seem to fall prey to, instead of challenging, Democrat assumptions.  In this case, that means asking the question that is the headline of this post: Why does the GOP need its own version of ObamaCare?  Why does the Unaffordable Care Act need to be replaced?  What was wrong with the health insurance market the way it was before the Dems and their false messiah broke it, setting off multiple death spirals, bending the cost curve upward, making the borderline-alchemist feat of making premiums and deductibles directly proportional, bankrupting States through already bankrupted Medicaid expansions, and taking away the well-liked plans of millions of Americans and sticking them with exorbitant, comprehensive, one-size-fits-none garbage coverage that they did not and do not want?  Anybody looking at this issue objectively has to admit that healthcare in this country is vastly worse off now than it was six years ago.  Shouldn't repeal and a return to the status quo ante be enough?

Not to hear 'Pubbies tell it:

"Conservatives and Republicans have been accused of not having a plan," Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-GA6, told conservatives as part of a panel hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, reports the Hill.

"When you have [a large] number of plans and you haven't coalesced around a plan, you don't have any plan."

And as long as Republicans don't rally around one plan, "we'll continue to be subject to the demagoguery from the other side," said Price, a doctor who hopes to push GOP efforts this year.

That's certainly true.  Demagoguery is what Dems do, and they do it for the same reason that they enact and entrench statist entitlement programs in the first place: to perpetuate the myth that unless the government takes over and becomes the sole provider of any commodity, that commodity will no longer be available.  That without gargantuan, unconstitutional government, life itself will cease to exist.  There is no free market, there is no invisible hand, there is no spoon.



The thing is, the Dem-agoguery would not stop when Republicans finally united behind an ObamaCare replacement plan.  If it was O-Care-lite, Dems would accuse us of wanting to "take away Americans' healthcare" and "perpetuate genocide on the American people" and call us the "healthcare ISIS" and so forth.  If it went in the complete opposite direction towards full-fledged remarketization of American healthcare, with inter-State portability and tax credits to wean us off of the third-party payment paradigm and restoring the direct pricing mechanism to the doctor/hospital-patient relationship and the whole nine yards, ushering in a healthcare renaissance in this country, we would be accused of wanting to "turn back the clock" to the "dark ages" of "primitivism" and "superstition" when people sought out "witch doctors" and "bled themselves with leeches" and had half the lifespans that "government health care has given us".  And, you know, us wanting to "take away Americans' healthcare" and "perpetuate genocide on the American people" and call us the "healthcare ISIS".

The Democrats, in short, are assholes, jackoffs, and scumbags.  So what does it matter what they say when they're going to say it no matter what we do or do not do?

Let us get back to practical reality.  ObamaCare has done massive damage to American healthcare.  Millions of Americans have been swindled and dislocated from where they were six years ago.  That cannot be ignored.  There will have to be some sort of post-repeal measure to transition our injured countrymen back to the coverage they once had.  Indeed, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin authored a bill to do just that last summer when there was still a theoretical chance that the SCOTUS would fix John Roberts' cowardly lawlessness from three years earlier.  So if some sort of post-repeal legislation is inevitable, why not augment it with all the free-market reforms we know need to be enacted to get the federal government out of the health insurance market where it does not constitutionally belong?

Will the Democrats demagogue it?  Of course.  But we can also passionately champion it.  And then the American electorate will have a bona fide choice.  And if they choose the government-run nightmare they've claimed to oppose ever since it was rammed down our throats six years ago, then they will do so with their eyes wide open and without any more excuses.

That ought to make nominating Ted Cruz as the GOP presidential standardbearer even more of a no-brainer.

If, however, we nominate Donald Trump.....

On the other side of the ticket, Donald Trump, who is maintaining his stronghold on the GOP polls, favors a single-payer system such as Canadians have, and promised that if elected "I am going to take care of everybody . . . the government's gonna pay for it," he said.

....then that is going to be the grand bull moose gold medal winner of incoherent mixed messages.

And the GOP will die in Whiggish agony.

Something tells me ObamaCare isn't going to cover that.