Rick Fischer
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

Your comment might work on the gullible ignorant, but no one else. Republicans could have written any bill they wanted, but it would not survive a Democrat filibuster, and certainly would not survive an Obama veto. No health care reform bill will pass both houses of Congress that does not have bipartisan support.

Mandating that everyone buy insurance or be fined is NOT a Conservative idea. Nor is dictating what coverages are allowed or forbidden in insurance plans. Men forced to cover pregnancy? Women forced to cover prostate cancer? Elderly forced to cover neonatal care?

Nor was the 50 employee trigger a good idea. Or the creation of multiple regulatory agencies that already have issued scores of thousands of pages of new regulations. Or structuring the pre-existing condition fix in such a way that people can wait until after they develop a catastrophic illness before paying their first premium, and forcing the insurance company to cover the whole bill.

It was not a Conservative idea to use trickery to cancel all existing plans, that people liked and could afford, and replace them with government approved plans that people didn’t want and were double the cost.

Getting ACA passed required many months of our president lying his head off, and CBO fraud to score the bill at less than half of what the actual cost would be. And the president changing the law and refusing to enact parts of it at all, all on his own orders with no actual authority to do any of that.

I promise you that Democrats wanted to pass single payer, but even what they did pass was disliked by the majority of Americans; passing single payer would have caused a revolt. Democrats are surely dumb, but they ain’t stupid. As it was, it cost a lot of Democrat seats in Congress.

“By no means is it a perfect bill, but why not just improve on it?” All right, name a single bill any Democrat has introduced in either the House or the Senate since ACA was passed to “improve on it”.

“More people have insurance than had it before.” This is the result of expanding Medicaid. That could have been done with a small bipartisan Medicaid reform bill. Democrats didn’t need to interfere with the health insurance of everyone else. A whole lot of people already had good, affordable plans they liked; what justified Democrats to undo all that?

“The rate of insurance price increase has slowed.” Big deal, after doubling or in places tripling the cost of premiums and deductibles, driving all but one insurer out of over 40% of US counties and leaving 47 counties with no insurer, costs are still going up, but at a slower rate. Big whoopdeedo!

There is no “reform” accomplished by ACA that couldn’t have been done much better by small, focused bills dedicated to specific reforms. Trying to fundamentally change a complex system constituting a sixth of the entire economy, and doing it in one single monster bill, was insanity destined to fail.