The Dems don’t really want to “fix it.” Every attempt to make a legislative change has been blocked in the Senate. Don’t let them get away with it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Hey, remember when Dems thought that the VA was a great model for government health care?
But they continue to pine for single payer, and surreptitiously or otherwise hope that the ObamaCare debacle will push us in that direction.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More problems and arguments lie ahead:
…the vast middle ground of “modify the law without repealing it” is terra incognita. It is as accurate as Burns’s formulation, and no less precise, to say that those who want to leave the law as it is are outnumbered more than 5 to 1 by those who want to repeal or change it.
There’s an additional ambiguity: What does it mean to leave the law “unchanged” when the Supreme Court has already struck down parts of it and the administration has declined to follow or enforce others? That’s not a salient question for immediate electoral purposes; in terms of voting intention, “left unchanged” can be taken as a statement of support for the Democrats. But even if the statutory language proves resistant to any effort at modification, there will be a new administration after 2016. That could mean more discretionary (or extralegal) changes and perhaps the end of ObamaCare as we know it.
“ObamaCare as we know it” is also an ambiguous turn of phrase, to say the least, for what do we know of ObamaCare? A few provisions are relatively straightforward, such as the expansion of Medicaid eligibility (in those states that have gone along with it) and the mandate that family insurance plans cover 23-, 24- and 25-year-old children of policyholders.
But the whole of ObamaCare is an insanely complicated scheme that even experts are still struggling to understand. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it–away from the fog of the controversy,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said in March 2010. We’ll be finding out for many years to come, and there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift.
The only way to lift the fog is to blow it all away.
[Update a few minutes later]
And then there’s this:
“The IRS isn’t likely to bring such proceedings to earn a pittance,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan, tells McIntyre. Then again, it wasn’t money the Obama IRS was after when it embarked on a campaign of harassment against conservative nonprofit organizations. These ObamaCare penalties may be too draconian to be applied generally, but applied selectively, they could be a powerful weapon of an abusive administration.
This administration is nothing if not abusive of the weapons at its disposal.
there’s no reason to think that “fog” will ever lift
It hasn’t lifted, but it is thinning some. There is currently no effort in the House to repeal the ACA, a big change from the last 3 1/2 years. The House leadership has indefinitely postponed its promised replacement for the ACA. Mike Pence, a 2016 GOP hopeful, is supporting Medicaid expansion in Indiana.
Overall it seems that the GOP is getting used to the idea that the ACA will be around for a long time.
That’s because they’re waiting until they control the Senate next year.
They’ve just changed their strategy. They know Dingy Harry won’t do anything in the Senate, so what is the point in sending a repeal law? Your presumptions on GOP strategy reveal a tremendous ignorance of conservative ideals.
They know Dingy Harry won’t do anything in the Senate, so what is the point in sending a repeal law?
And you think they just figured this out? Give them a little bit of credit.
They knew all along that their repeal bills weren’t going anywhere. They passed them anyway, one after another after another, because they thought it was to their political advantage to constantly spotlight their position on repeal. Evidently they don’t see it that way any more.
Or maybe they’ve decided they’ve made their point and are letting Obama’s incompetence speak for itself.