THE GOP DELUSION: Obamacare will be repealed

Obamacare Repeal Is Failing Because It Was Based on a Lie 



 Last week, Richard Hanna, a Republican from central New York who just retired from Congress, admitted something that almost no member of his party in elected office has been willing to concede in public. “At the end of the day, the Affordable Care Act will in some form survive, and the millions of people who are on it will have insurance,” he said. “It’s something this country needed and something people want. Politically, it’s untenable to just wipe it away. 

So who really won? In my argument, the president, Obama, won. At the end of the day we will have some sort of national health care that’s going to look very similar to what we have.” The mania for destroying the law is faltering because the Republican crusade to kill Obamacare was always based on delusions that are no longer possible to conceal. View image on Twitter

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Republicans suffer from an additional handicap that Democrats did not face in 2010: they are not merely over-promising what they can deliver, they are promising the exact opposite. While GOP rhetoric has lambasted the cost of plans offered by Obamacare, their alternatives would all impose even higher costs. An extended public debate over actual, filled-out Republican plans that force people onto catastrophic plans that do not cover basic medical expenses would be a political debacle. 

It is not only majority opinion that is swinging against Republicans on health care. Lobbyists, too, tend to organize against change. Hospitals are demanding that Republicans either keep covering the Americans who have insurance through Obamacare, or else compensate the hospitals for the losses they would suffer from facing millions of customers who can longer pay for their care. AARP has staked out opposition to one of the GOP’s favorite proposals to tweak Obamacare, which would allow insurers to charge even higher rates to older customers. 

Obamacare only permits insurers to charge older customers up to three times as much as the young. Republicans have railed against the burden this places on younger workers buying insurance — and it’s true that Obamacare makes the young pay more so the old can pay less. But now Republicans are learning the difference between posturing against a law, and cherry-picking its downsides, and actually having to endorse an alternative position. When you have to pick winners and losers, not just complain about the losers in the other party’s law, you make people mad.