"What Have You Got?" Obama's Asking Republicans for Ideas?
Of course, Obama will dismiss any Republican plans as not being "good ideas"--just as he dismissed them all before--because anything other than his ObamaCare can't possibly be a "good idea." Nothing has changed, for Obama. He's on record as saying it will not be repealed "as long as I'm President" and "We're Not Going Back" and "If I've Got To Fight Another Three Years To Make Sure This Law Works, That's What I'll Do"...
...all this despite the fact that TIME is reporting a new national poll finding: "Young Adults Rejecting Obamacare" (and for that matter, Obama's job performance as well)...
There are some GOP healthcare reform plans that have long ago been proposed. The interesting thing is, the piecemeal approach they seem to represent may actually have been the better way to approach it:
ObamaCare, everyone knows, is one, monolithic, interlocking, interdependent beast. If you pull one thread, or one card out, the thing doesn't work at all anymore but rather falls apart. It was designed that way, to make it seemingly unattackable. Perhaps passing several smaller laws designed to succeed in one or more areas apiece, and to complement each other, is the solution.Beyond ObamaCare's impossible-to-plug-in-plug-out status as a law, its biggest problems are its underlying presumptions (see Paul Ryan's quoting the Senate budget leader's likening it to the "Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud" that we all now know it is):
So not only has Obama and his ObamaCare lost the young healthy Millennials, he's about to lose the Baby Boomers who are on or about to be on Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans, when they realize that ObamaCare siphoned off HALF A TRILLION dollars from Medicare payments, just like the government (both Republicans and Democrats since Eisenhower) once siphoned off all Social Security monies. Think we've got actual trillions of dollars in the SS Trust Fund? Oh, really...
And Social Security is soon about to take in less than it pays out, starting...next month...
So we Baby Boomers will find our Social Security dwindling (or are children's and grandchildren's taxes skyrocketing to pay for us) AND we'll find Medicare cut to ribbons, all at the same time, the latter thanks to ObamaCare.
But right now, the only, most-obvious (to everyone, now, because the MainStream Media is finally covering it) ObamaCare fault line is that the young contingent of healthy Millennials may just have written this off as not trustworthy and not worthy of their money, period. This removes "Affordable" as the proper adjective for millions.
Why haven't you heard of all these GOP ideas before? Because the MainStream Media (MSM) wouldn't report them to you while there were so many tingles running up their legs. That doesn't mean that we weren't trying to tell you, of course. The trees were falling in the forest and making sounds, regardless of the lack of MSM microphones to record it:
- James Capretta and Robert Moffit's plan, original and updated version.
- Solving the Pre-Existing Conditions Issue (Yes, it can be done--and done better-- without ObamaCare)
- "Interstate insurance will work, but the market will evolve gradually..." in which it has been
"projected that a national insurance market would increase health coverage by 49 percent in New Jersey and 22 percent in New York. 'We find evidence of a significant opportunity to reduce the number of uninsured under a proposal to allow the purchase of insurance across state lines. The best scenario to reduce the uninsured, numerically, is competition among all 50 states with one clear winner. The most pragmatic scenario, with a good impact, is one winner in each regional market.'"
"The main barrier to establishing the sale of health insurance across state lines is the lobbying of each state’s insurance commissioner...These state insurance commissioners fight against this popular health care reform for one reason: power. Right now, they have it. When the sale of health insurance is restricted to just inside their state, they have the power to set and enforce the rules however they would like. In fact, that’s their primary response to the reform proposal: You can’t trust those other insurance commissioners, they’ll set worse rules than me, overly lenient ones! You don’t know anything about insurance, especially not health insurance; it’s much too complicated. Don’t worry about it though, I’ll protect you. As long as I set the rules for insurance in our state, I’ll make sure the insurance companies cover everything you need. Promise!
Tell them to just step aside. They're standing in the way of people benefiting.Realistically, it’s a power struggle. Insurance commissioners, like all bureaucrats, need to wield power in order to justify their position. Losing their total control over regulating the health insurance offered in their state means a loss of power. And like any other bureaucrat, they’ll fight that to their last breath.
Part two of the last link is here:
"Increasing market competition by allowing Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines will lead to lower costs, greater choice, and better quality of care
. Representative Paul Broun’s (R-GA) Patient OPTION Act is just one of several conservative bills that will allow Americans to purchase health insurance across state lines." - The Republican Study Committee's (RSC) plan
"would, obviously, repeal ObamaCare and associated tax hikes and replace it with market-based, patient-centered reforms that lower health insurance costs expanding access to health savings accounts (HSA) and by removing barriers that discourage competition."
- The Media's "Republicans Have No Obamacare Replacement" Myth....
Congressional Republicans know what they want to do...This is a picture of broad agreement throughout the [Republican] caucus on numerous health policy issues – the only real disagreements are about how to achieve these goals, not what the goals are. But what’s notable about this approach is that unlike PPACA [aka ObamaCare], you don’t need the Rube Goldberg-like assemblage of a 2,700 page bill to do it. You can do this in fifty pages, as Rep. Paul Broun does (he also reforms EMTALA, too!), or you could break them up and pass them separately. You don’t have a situation where pulling one block out makes the rest collapse, as we’re seeing even now in the arguments over states passing on the Medicaid expansion. Journalists who say this more gradualist approach to reform means there is no plan betray their ignorance or their bias or both.
- In fact, we might still have too many (this was written 16 months ago, not sure if these bills are all still around):
So with 3.5 years and close to $1 billion of American (taxpayer) money, this thing should have flown to the moon and back, beaten the pants off of Amazon, Travelocity and Google combined, and whistled Dixie while it did all that. And not only has it failed miserably to do that, it will NEVER be "all that."
The bottom line is: now, all Americans know that this public nightmare (only just beginning) is what you get instead when you let the government take over something as important as One-Sixth of Our Economy.
Come January, I fear, the MSM will not be able to staunch the torrent of horror stories that will occur then, when the "back-end" payment-of-premiums software is still not working, when the data going to the insurances still isn't correct, when the security breaches are beginning to be reported. And again in early April, after the enrollment "deadline" passes, and they learn how few (and how few healthy Millennials) signed on to support the Ponzi scheme, thus driving the premiums of tens of millions through the roof. And then again whenever they finally force the small businesses to comply (after one delay already), then all those plans will be cancelled and dropped. Then again, when the medium and large businesses are forced to comply, maybe in 2015, and the 80+% of Americans will finally all have had their health plans cancelled and their costs skyrocket.
It's true: Obama's in the fight of his (public) life. Trouble is, he can't stop all the above from happening, because it was he who forced it into law. The only way to stop it all from happening...is to repeal the law, now. Then only the first wave's damage--through 2014--will be irreversible...not all of the damage.
Maybe, after ObamaCare crashes in on itself from its sheer dead weight, and Americans are left to clean up the swath of destruction it's left in its tracks, maybe one or several of these Republican alternatives finally can be taken seriously and be implemented in succession, like laying bricks one by one, skillfully, to mop up the mess as best we can, restore the good parts of our healthcare/insurance markets from before (there were some very good private plans out there, as we all know well now), while fixing what parts were bad.
More on all those, whenever I have time...Feel free to DYOR.
posted by Annie at 8:08 PM
