It’s a longer-term project, but definitely doable. And it would be a great victory for freedom, with the biggest rollback of the state in almost a century, since The New Deal.
12 thoughts on “How To Repeal ObamaCare”
Comments are closed.
It’s a longer-term project, but definitely doable. And it would be a great victory for freedom, with the biggest rollback of the state in almost a century, since The New Deal.
Comments are closed.
“At the moment Democrats are hanging their hat on the CBO-scored deficit reduction associated with the two laws. This CBO score means that a straight repeal amendment faces a Budget Act point of order and therefore needs 60 votes to succeed. If Republicans were in 2013 to try to repeal the laws as-is, CBO would score them with increasing the deficit. That’s not impossible to do through reconciliation, but it’s a trickier path.”
I wonder if this CBO estimate was arrived at using bogus tricks and assumptions.
Could there be another CBO estimate done when/if the GOP retakes the Senate (and holds the house) with different assumptions? If so that would remove that problem.
It’s hardly necessary to reach 60 Republicans in the Senate for repeal, and I for one tremble at the thought of a Republican House, President and 60+ seat Senate. But I do not think Democratic Senators are uneducably stupid. If Obama is wiped out in 2012 by a Republican candidate with a big Repeal Big Ears’ Major Stupid plank in his platform and a bunch of Republicans take Senate seats on the same message — why, I’m pretty sure between 3 and 5 Democratic votes in the Senate could be found for repeal. They’re not that suicidal.
I’m disturbed a little by all this pinning of hopes on the Republicans only. Ideally we want to educate both parties, so that we continue to have a choice in elections. Not a choice between Stalinism and liberty, no, but a choice between two different kinds of liberty.
I still favor digging an ‘escape hatch’ on the chance the bureaucracy ossifies into position too fast.
Require insurers to offer ‘Health Savings Accounts’. Require 5% of deductibles to go into them. Require a a wide array of deductibles for a given level of service.
The vast majority of people would be able to recapture the 5% in just one year as they switch into a higher deductible version of the exact same plan. (Most people aren’t net health-care consumers just yet.) Even people who are net consumers would just be sending their 5% on a little detour before spending it.
But even trivial amounts of money in health savings accounts would at least potentially expose people to some market forces.
“I wonder if this CBO estimate was arrived at using bogus tricks and assumptions.”
Gregg, there wasn’t a need. It works like this: by repealing ObamaCare, spending goes down and so does tax revenue. The trick is the higher taxes ObamaCare introduced, that would get repealed, are projected (the original tricks and assumptions) to take in more money than the spending increase, and that’s where the deficit increase comes in. Watch: current projection: 2.5 billion tax revenue, 3 billion in spending, total deficit half a billion. These are numbers, obviously, I just made up, but are representative. Repeal ObamaCare removes .7 billion revenue and .5 increase spending. Result: new projection is 1.8 billion revenue, 2.5 billion spending, 700 million deficit. Oops, deficit went up 200 billion dollars. The democrats just don’t mention that’s 200 billion dollars increased deficit on 500 dollars less spending.
Rick, you may be amused by Harvard economist Greg Mankiw’s response to this “argument” by the Party of Cynicism: Mankiw said:
“I have a plan to reduce the budget deficit. The essence of the plan is the federal government writing me a check for $1 billion. The plan will be financed by $3 billion of tax increases. According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, giving me that $1 billion will reduce the budget deficit by $2 billion.”
“Now, you may be tempted to say that giving me that $1 billion will not really reduce the budget deficit. Rather, you might say, it is the tax increases, which have nothing to do with my handout, that are reducing the budget deficit. But if you are tempted by that kind of sloppy thinking, you have not been following the debate over healthcare reform….”
Rick C Says:
“Gregg, there wasn’t a need. It works like this:..”
Yeah that’s one of the tricks I was talking about. Another was 10 years of tax collection for 6 years of services…without regard to what happens 4 years later.
The CBO has to take the assumptions as given. Garbage in Garbage out. I was just wondering if the GOP can have the calculation re-done with less garbage in. And if they have to own Congress to make that happen
Obamacare is actually Hillary care which is actually an old Republican concept to force people into the arms of the private health insurance companies, the folks who are primarily responsible for creating the most expensive and inherently inflationary health care system on Earth.
Private health insurance companies are making it more and more difficult for private US businesses to compete. We need a real public that’s more similar to that in Singapore, the least costly and most effective and efficient health insurance system on Earth:
How a ‘Real’ Public Option Could Reduce Deficits, Create Jobs, & Save the US Economy!:
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2001/11/how-real-public-option-could.html
private health insurance companies, the folks who are primarily responsible for creating the most expensive and inherently inflationary health care system on Earth.
And here I was going to blame irrational slogan-slinging Free Lunch thinking, such as you display here. Silly me! Why blame common intellectual laziness when there is the more fascinating possibility of a conspiracy by the Illuminati to consider?
Private health insurance companies are making it more and more difficult for private US businesses to compete
Because the surest way to market dominance is to sell a service that subtracts from every customer’s bottom line! After all, look at all the successful firms of the past: Ford got rich selling us traffic jams, Microsoft selling us Blue Screens O’ Death, and Boeing horrific air crashes in which hundreds die. Only Big Brother can save us from the evil schemes of corporations.
I could’ve sworn it was trial lawyers that were making it hard for businesses to compete — by forcing businesses to spend so damned much on insurance.
No one has a right to the fruit of another person’s labor, and that includes health care (which, contrary to theftist dogma, does not grow in octopus-infested trees).
Here we go again. Someone comes along and points to some specific region with a fairly homogenous population and gaffaws, “that’s it, that’s the one, we need to copy that one!!” As if we can just transplant another countries system as is, into our own, and expect it to just instantly start humming right along. Now if only health services were like Walmart:
[Step on into Healthmart and swing by the deli counter]
Patient: “I’d like 150lbs of Cardiologist please. Anything imported from France? Oh, and the stent trays you have on special sitting out front here.”
Deli kid: “Naw, we just got the one’s from Wisconsin right now. And the trays are a buy 2 for $5000 so if you have a blubbery grandfather or somebody you know that needs a tuneup right now it would be a great value!!”
Patient: “Oh really! Well, then I think I will get the 2nd tray and go ahead and make it a double bypass. Oh, and while I’m getting the bypass can I get the pedicure and family portrait with my dog to remember the experience by. That’d be awesome!”
Deli Kid:”Your total comes to $37,570.30…Would you like to put that on your Healthmart credit card today?”
The real problem with health care is the distortion of market forces. By law, doctors, pharma, and medical equipment vendors are not allowed to market/use equally reliable yet less expensive medical treatments.
If you set up a system that only allows treatment techniques that are “best”, and you do not include cost as a factor in “best”, you will get expensive medicine.
No, David, the real problem with health care is that it can’t do the one thing we really want it to do, which is prevent us from dying. Pretty much all our other difficulties with it stem from that fundamental disappointment.