When Health Repeal Fails, What Should the GOP Do?
The Republican plan to repeal the Democrats health care bill won't succeed. But as my latest column for The Week points out there is still much the GOP can do to repair the bill's flaws.
Next week, Republicans in the House of Representatives will vote to repeal Democratic health reform. Promise kept!
Then the "Repeal-the-Job-Killing-Health-Care-Act of 2011" will proceed to the Senate. Where nothing will happen.
What then?
What should happen then is a Republican focus on the most immediately dangerous aspects of the 2010 health care law.
Let me point to two.
First, the health care reform enacted last year is financed in almost the most destructive possible way, with new taxes on payrolls and investment. Precisely at a time when we should be encouraging more payroll and more investment, the health care reform penalizes both.
There's a lot to like about the basic architecture of the health reform law: universal private health insurance, subsidies for those who cannot afford it, regulation against the worst insurance abuses.
But the devil always is in the details, and it's the details again and again that are the problem. Our highest national priority should be to slow and even reverse the direction of healthcare spending. But by appearing to load the costs of the program onto higher-income taxpayers, the Democratic plan will tempt politicians to focus on extending benefits — which go to lots of voters — without regard to costs, which appear to be paid only by a few.
If Republicans cannot repeal the healthcare law, and they cannot, they should fight at least to make that law’s costs as visible as possible. How about a health care VAT? Every time you go to the store, you'd pay the full cost of health care subsidies, right up front, where nobody can miss them. Suddenly that abstract talking point in the president's speeches — the one about spending 17 percent of national income on health when most other industrial nations spend between 10 percent and 13 percent — will become a whole lot less abstract. ...
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