Tuesday, March 28, 2017
My Thoughts On Failing to Repeal Obamacare
Lately, there's been a lot of breaking the 11th Amendment, which isn't necessarily bad, but is pretty bad right now. Here's what I think.
I thought the whole idea regarding repealing Obamacare was to get the Government out of health care and health care insurance (two distinct things) as much as possible. I thought the idea was to allow choice of what sort of coverage people could buy (a cafeteria style option rather than one size fits all) and remove anything impeding the selling of such insurance so that competition would start to reduce the extreme uptick in the cost of most plans.
To do that, merely repealing the only-supported-by-Democrats legislation, and reducing statutory and regulatory impediments to competition, was all that was needed.
But the brainiacs decided to keep government involved and not fully remove the ACA and impediments to competition. Worse, they decided to keep what they thought were "popular" parts of Obamacare; namely, keeping 26 year old children on their parents healthcare plan and preventing health care insurance plans from refusing to cover medical treatment for conditions that pre-existed the purchase of the plan.
I could live with the 26 year old children, but not allowing pre-existing condition exclusions is the death knell for private health insurance. People will get the minimum catastrophic coverage or no coverage at all and then upgrade to plans offering greater coverage if they get sick or hurt.
The Freedom Caucus saw all this and said, we can't let our party pass what amounts to Obamacare lite which will suffer the same fate as real Obamacare.
They are getting a lot of abuse, but I see them as principled and smart people who properly opposed a terrible decision by the Republican leadership. I also think history will be ever kinder to them than the likes of Prager and Hewitt are being now. And I say that knowing those two people are much smarter than I am. They are human, though, and capable of making a mistake. They're mistaken here.
I thought the whole idea regarding repealing Obamacare was to get the Government out of health care and health care insurance (two distinct things) as much as possible. I thought the idea was to allow choice of what sort of coverage people could buy (a cafeteria style option rather than one size fits all) and remove anything impeding the selling of such insurance so that competition would start to reduce the extreme uptick in the cost of most plans.
To do that, merely repealing the only-supported-by-Democrats legislation, and reducing statutory and regulatory impediments to competition, was all that was needed.
But the brainiacs decided to keep government involved and not fully remove the ACA and impediments to competition. Worse, they decided to keep what they thought were "popular" parts of Obamacare; namely, keeping 26 year old children on their parents healthcare plan and preventing health care insurance plans from refusing to cover medical treatment for conditions that pre-existed the purchase of the plan.
I could live with the 26 year old children, but not allowing pre-existing condition exclusions is the death knell for private health insurance. People will get the minimum catastrophic coverage or no coverage at all and then upgrade to plans offering greater coverage if they get sick or hurt.
The Freedom Caucus saw all this and said, we can't let our party pass what amounts to Obamacare lite which will suffer the same fate as real Obamacare.
They are getting a lot of abuse, but I see them as principled and smart people who properly opposed a terrible decision by the Republican leadership. I also think history will be ever kinder to them than the likes of Prager and Hewitt are being now. And I say that knowing those two people are much smarter than I am. They are human, though, and capable of making a mistake. They're mistaken here.
Labels: Failure to Repeal Obamacare; Freedom Caucus Saved Republicans From Horrible Mistake. Obamacare Lite
