In 2010, Congress passed Obamacare. President Obama signed it into law. To their credit, not a single Republican voted for Obamacare. Since the day Obamacare became law, Republicans have campaigned non-stop against it. There were elections in 2010, 2012 and 2014. The centerpiece of the Republican message was get rid of Obamacare.
Now, the perfect storm is coming together to destroy Obamacare once and for all.
And what is the Republican Party doing?
The GOP in Washington is working on the Obamacare bailout.
The perfect storm is twofold. First, Americans who applied for Obamacare and received a subsidy are about to get a rude shock. For many of those people, the government miscalculated the subsidy. If the government overpaid the subsidy, there is a claw-back provision in Obamacare that allows the government to take the money back.
Millions of people are going to get some really bad news when they file their taxes. They aren’t getting a refund. They are going to owe thousands or even tens of thousands. Remember, these are people who could not afford health insurance to begin with.
How are they going to pay the claw-back payments?
This will force a lot of people into bankruptcy. And unfortunately, they will discover that they cannot discharge those obligations in bankruptcy.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the case of King v. Burwell. Most court observers expect the Supreme Court will strike down the federal government’s subsidy programs in the 34 states that have not implemented health care exchanges.
This will destroy Obamacare. The numbers simply do not work without the subsidies.
Instead of readying on a legislative sword to chop the head off of the Obamacare monster, the GOP leadership is planning a replacement bill that is merely “Obamacare-lite.”
Obamacare-lite is half the agony with twice the problems.
Instead of simply junking the whole thing, the Republicans want to leave in most of the employer mandates. They do want to allow some good things, such as the portability of insurance across state lines.
Unfortunately, the Republican Party seems more interested in helping big insurance instead of real Americans. One of the proposals in the Hatch-Burr plan, which is the GOP replacement for Obamacare, is to impose medical malpractice caps through out the United States.
This has been the Holy Grail for big insurance for a while.
If someone goes to the hospital for a knee replacement and the doctor amputates their leg instead, under Hatch-Burr their damages would be limited. And, instead of getting a trial by a jury of their peers, instead they would funnel them off to some quasi-administrative board. Imagine the worst of the IRS and the DMV all rolled up in one.
Why the Republicans are so anxious to kowtow to big insurance is a mystery. Big insurance generally gives to Democrats over Republicans.
The real problem here is Washington. Obamacare has been a disaster. Barack Obama may be the only one in Washington still in denial about that. But in Washington, they expect America to rely on the people who caused the problem to start with to then fix the problem.
What is wrong with that picture?
Give this problem another six weeks and even hard-core Democratic voters are going to be screaming for Obamacare to be repealed. Republicans could get in front of this wave and help launch a Republican majority that will last for a decade.
But if history is any indication, Republicans will take a Democratic problem and turn it into a much worse Republican problem.
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