And Rep. Steve King (R-IA) opts for ‘much easier‘:
King appeared on MSNBC earlier, to talk about the upcoming repeal vote. The host noted, “[S]o you’re willing to go out there and repeal health care to everybody, even with a pre-existing condition, repeal the ability for kids to stay on their parents’ health plan till they’re 26 years old — don’t you think that would be met with tremendous backlash?” King replied:
“I actually don’t think it would be met with tremendous backlash. There are Republicans who support those ideas and we start tomorrow the process of replacement of ‘Obamacare.’
“It will not work for us to say there’s a certain component of Obamacare that has some merit and so therefore we want to leave that in place and repeal the rest. This is too many pages, it’s too cluttered, it’s too big an argument to allow it to turn on one or two minor things.”
In this context, it appears protection for children with pre-existing conditions is a “minor thing.”
Of course, what Rep. King more likely means is that figuring out how to change ill-considered parts of a very large and complicated law while retaining the parts that work well, that are popular, and that help solve important problems is just too damn hard. It gives him a headache to even think about it. It’s so much easier just to repeal the entire law. Which is what Ezra Klein is on to with this:
As expected, House Republicans have voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Three Democrats voted with them, which is substantially less than the 13 currently serving Democrats who voted against the bill in the first place, and many less than prominent Republicans had been predicting. On health-care reform, the two parties are moving further apart rather than closer together.
What’s not as expected, however, is that the GOP gave up on “repeal and replace” so early. Throughout the election, that was their message. If you look at their press language, it’s still their message. Being on the side of the status quo is, according to the pollsters, a bad place to be. But that’s where they are. They voted for repeal despite offering nothing in the way of replacement, save for the vague intention to have some committees come up with some ideas at some future date. …
There’s a reason for that: Opposition is easy, governing is hard. You have to get your members to agree on a single piece of legislation. You have to make the tough tradeoffs that are the hallmark of governance. You have to explain how you’ll do things, rather than merely what you want done. You have to own the popular parts and defend the unpopular parts.
Democrats did that for health care. They fought ugly fights in their own party over the public option, the financing of the legislation, the levels of coverage in the bill, the way abortion would be treated in the exchanges. They made some easy decisions, like banning discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and some hard ones, like adding an individual mandate to the bill, and paying for it through Medicare cuts rather than a tax on the wealthy. And in the end, they managed to pass their law through the House and through the Senate. They governed. They sought to move the country forward.
Boehner’s GOP, in deciding against offering the promised replacement for the Affordable Care Act, ducked the hard work and highest responsibilities of governance. Maybe, in the coming months, they’ll do better than that. Maybe their committees will report out serious alternatives and they’ll be brought to the floor of the House. But this isn’t the first time health-care policy has come up in Washington. If the GOP had wanted to offer a plan of their own, there are plenty they could’ve taken off the shelf. If they’d needed more time, well, there was no hurry. But they didn’t take more time, or dust off an existing piece of legislation. Backwards was good enough.
And for at least the last 30 years, that’s been the way the Republican Party operates. The party of Lincoln got left behind a long time ago.
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