Mary Matalin was on The Colbert Report tonight, and after she was done lying about “deem and pass”, she talked about Republicans’ plans for “repealing” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka: health care reform). Here’s a tip for seeing through Republican talking points on health care; if they preface their statements by claiming that they’ll keep the ban on use of pre-existing conditions, they’re bluffing. Any Republican that insists on keeping new consumer protections is tacitly admitting they’re resigned to tinkering around the edges of the bill.
The core of the PPCA is three interdependent components: tough regulations for health insurance providers, an individual mandate, and subsidies to lower-income individuals. By conceding that the regulations have to stay, Republicans are essentially conceding the
entire framework of the bill.
As Paul Krugman has pointed out, PPCA is a balancing act. If you aren’t going to repeal the new regulations, there’s no way insurers will allow the repeal of the mandate. If the mandate is repealed but the regulations are left, many people won’t buy insurance at all, and will wait until they get sick to buy
coverage. This will drive the insurers out of business. So, unless Republicans are looking to go to war with the business community, they’ll keep the mandate intact.
At this point, Republicans have already conceded two-thirds of the structure of the bill. The one component we haven’t discussed yet is the subsidies, and how to pay for them, but last time Republicans were unopposed in power, they weren’t able to make a dent in spending on
social safety net programs. The best they were able to do is keep spending the same and shift the funding burden from taxes to deficit spending. Doing this to PPCA would be unhealthy (see also: the squandering of the Clinton surplus), but wouldn’t come remotely close to undermining the bill as a whole. As far as I can tell, once a Republican concedes the new regulations, they concede 90% of PPCA is here to stay.
I’m starting a count of what I’ll call the “Cornyn bluffers”, the Republicans that bluster about repealing health care reform while implicitly admitting that they will, at most, tinker around the edges. John Cornyn was the charter member of this coalition, and Matalin joined last night. Who will be next?
Of course, in CT, we know all about this amendment. Thank god, Senators Lieberman (WTF-CT) and Brown (R-MA) are supporting the Terrorist Expatriation Act which lets the government revoke your citizenship if you ever finance or give resources to any groups on a list defined by the Secretary of State. Progress!