The Republican Healthcare Plan Does Not Pass The Smell Test

The Republican Party has put itself in a terrible position.  It promised to replace the ACA with a better plan.  It struggled to put a plan together that many Republicans in the Freedom Caucus hate. They call it Obamacare 2.0.  Donald Trump was forced to persuade the GOP holdouts in the House to pass a bill that it can send to the Senate for passage.  Paul Krugman describes the terrible plan that he calls Obamacare 0.5  because it is modeled badly after the ACA.  It has been built upon the three pillars in the ACA, but each of the pillars has been weakened. Moreover, it has cut the taxes in the ACA that helped to fund the subsidies that enabled Americans with low incomes to purchase health insurance.  That creates another serious problem that could make running our government even worse.

The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) typically scores bills so that we understand how they will affect the federal budget.  Cutting taxes that helped to pay for the ACA will create a big hole in the budget. Republicans like to market their party as the fiscally conservative party.  So how did the GOP deal with the deficit problem caused by the tax cuts.  They sent to bill to the Senate without waiting the plan to be scored by the CBO.  This is clearly consistent with the way in which the Trump administration operates.  We don't need bipartisan technocrats in the CBO to inform politicians about the budget implications in proposed bills.  Trump does not care about budgets.  He is in a rush to tell his base that he delivered on a promise.

The Democrats have to make a decision when the plan is debated in the Senate.  They could get some help from GOP senators that hate the plan and send it back to the House.  The ACA will live on until the GOP can produce a better plan.  The Democrats can also let Republicans in the Senate approve the plan and let the GOP live with the consequences of a plan that has been opposed by the AMA; the AARP and the Hospital Association.  Some Republicans may want  the Democrats to kill the bill.   Then they can continue to undermine the ACA so that it is unable to do what it was intended to do.  They can then argue that ACA failed because it was a bad plan.  They will then avoid the chaos created the Republican plan.