March 30, 2017

The Right Cure for ObamaCare

“This is not the end of the debate.” Rep. Mark Meadows said that on ABC’s “This Week” regarding the House leadership’s failed health care bill, and he’s exactly right.

“This is not the end of the debate." Rep. Mark Meadows said that on ABC’s "This Week” regarding the House leadership’s failed health care bill, and he’s exactly right.

Even President Trump, as he was voicing disappointment over its legislative fate, couldn’t help noting “what’s going to come out of it is a better bill.”

That’s the key. The president and many other lawmakers campaigned on a clear-cut promise to repeal Obamacare. And while the House leadership’s bill did contain some good features, it simply failed to do the job. It left many of the law’s most damaging regulations in place.

Obamacare can’t be fixed. An overhaul, however much of an improvement it might appear to be, isn’t what we need (let alone what was promised). The so-called “Affordable Care Act” has to be cut out root and branch.

It has to be done right because people are really hurting. They’re facing steeply higher premiums and deductibles, for one thing. According to a Gallup poll, those paying some or all of their health premiums increasingly say their premiums have gone up (74 percent in 2015, up from 67 percent in 2014).

They also have fewer health plans to choose from. An increased regulatory burden has driven some providers from the market. That’s part of the reason that President Obama’s promise that if you like your doctor or plan, you can keep it rings so hollow. For many Americans, that hasn’t been their experience at all.

Plus, notes health care expert Ed Haislmaier, Obamacare allows people to wait until they need medical care to enroll in coverage. This effectively destabilized the individual insurance market. It created an adverse-selection process that helped jack up premiums, “as the law’s ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach of low-income subsidies coupled with a fine for not buying coverage failed to enroll enough healthy individuals,” he writes.

Sure, the House leadership bill would’ve repealed several of Obamacare’s insurance regulations, such as the age-rating restrictions that artificially inflate premiums for young adults. But the law’s federal coverage mandates would have remained intact.

The first attempt at Obamacare repeal may well have failed, according to Mr. Haislmaier, because lawmakers lost sight of the “why.” We need to remind ourselves why many people are having a bad experience with Obamacare: Its basic construct is untenable. Its purpose, he writes, was to “take control of private health plans and convert them into off-budget extensions of federal programs.”

Don’t take it from me. Take it from one of its supporters, Sara Rosenbaum, who in 2010 wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that Obamacare “transforms health insurance into a public accommodation,” and turns private health insurance into “a regulated industry that, in its restructured form, will therefore take on certain characteristics of a public utility.”

Yes, a public utility. Americans didn’t sign up for that. They wanted (and still want) reform that gives them greater control over their own health care, not a government-run system.

As Rep. Jim Jordan said after the House leadership bill was pulled, “Let’s stop doing the blame game and get back to work and do what we told the American people we were going to accomplish, which is repeal Obamacare and replace it with a patient-centered health care program.”

As Mr. Meadows said, the debate is far from over. We now have a chance to go back to the drawing board and do this right. The American people deserve a genuine cure. Will we give it to them?


Republished from The Heritage Foundation.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.