For years now, Republicans have been saying they're about to unveil their alternative to the Affordable Care Act, the "replace" in "repeal and replace." And while every now and again one or a few of them comes out with a plan (of varying levels of seriousness), none of them get much support, and they quickly get put back on the shelf. But now that the King v. Burwell lawsuit threatens to take insurance subsidies away from millions of Americans, some believe they have to do something to avoid the massive political fallout that will result. Byron York reports:
"We're worried about ads saying cancer patients are being thrown out of treatment, and Obama will be saying all Congress has to do is fix a typo," said one senior GOP aide involved in the work. In recent private polling for the conservative group Independent Women's Voice, a huge majority of respondents said it would be important to "do something to restore the subsidies" in the case of a Court decision striking them down.
Hill Republicans fear such a scenario would create huge pressure on Republican governors, who originally declined to create Obamacare exchanges in their states, to change course and set up state exchanges. The result could ultimately be an Obamacare that is even more firmly rooted and difficult to repeal than it is now-all because of a Republican "victory" in court.
To avoid all that, GOP lawmakers have decided to keep the money flowing. Maybe the payments won't be called subsidies, but they will be subsidies. The essence of Obamacare-government subsidizing the purchase of health insurance premiums-will remain intact.
But York says they haven't decided on a specific plan, which makes me a bit skeptical. Whenever this group does come up with something, conservatives are going to say that it gives in to Obama and they shouldn't bail him out. There are probably even some who think that if the subsidies get taken away, Americans will realize once and for all how awful the law is.
But even putting those deluded lawmakers aside, the fact that Republicans are just now getting around to thinking about this is remarkable in itself. When they all stampeded to support the lawsuit, what did they think would happen?
If the Court rules in their favor, we're going to go through another version of the argument Republicans are now having over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The pragmatic ones will say, "Let's just take care of this now to avoid disaster, and we'll live to fight another day." The conservatives will say, "We will not abide anything that aids Obamacare! Let it collapse of its own weight!" And then someone will try to come up with a compromise that extracts a pound of flesh from the law as the price of fixing the typo. Obama will say no dice, just fix the damn thing. Republicans will say, "See, it's Obama's fault your subsidies got taken away by the lawsuit we filed and supported!" No one will buy that, it'll drag on for a while with all the polls showing Republicans are getting the blame they deserve, and eventually they'll give in and fix it.
