Just in case House Republicans were planning a series of public chest-bumps, high-fives and keg parties if the Supreme Court decides to strike down all or parts of the health law, House Speaker John Boehner is shutting that down right now.
“There will be no spiking of the ball,” Boehner warned Thursday in a memo to House Republicans. “We will not celebrate at a time when millions of our fellow Americans remain out of work.”
The Supreme Court is expected to announce its much anticipated health law ruling next week and House GOP leaders already announced initial elements of their post-decision game plan. If the justices uphold the law or declare some elements (individual mandate, perhaps?) unconstitutional, House Republicans would vote again on full repeal.
But they wouldn’t rush “to pass a massive bill the American people don’t support,” Boehner said earlier this month. Instead, the party would instead pursue what he described as “commonsense, step-by-step reforms” including allowing people to buy insurance across state lines and permitting small businesses to pool together to purchase insurance to help them get the lower rates that larger businesses receive.
Boehner said Thursday that House GOP Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas, Conference Vice Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, and Policy Chairman Tom Price of Georgia would lead the party’s response team after the ruling is announced.
While we’re on the topic of sports metaphors: If Republican members are asked a question they don’t like, they could do what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., did when he used the sports metaphor of the week, telling a reporter: “That’s a clown question, bro.” Reid was mimicking young Washington Nationals phenom Bryce Harper, who used that rebuke to brush off a journalist inquiring about what kind of Canadian beer the 19-year-old Harper preferred.
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The only thing Republicans would be entitled to high-five is their great victory in the messaging war. When $235 million is funneled into hate speech talk radio one liners, it makes sense that the American public is afraid of a law packed with consumer protections.
The GOP proffered solutions are so woefully lacking that America would be entering the Great Depression of healthcare access if the law is struck down.
Texas enacted tort reform and boasts the highest uninsured rate in the country at 25%.
If the high court rules against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in total, it means we will still have a broken health care system. America will continue to rank 37th in the industrialized world in health care. There will still be over 50 million Americans who are uninsured. There will still be a estimated 25 million more who are underinsured. We will still pay over 17 cents of every tax dollar collected on health care and we will continue to have the most expensive health care system in the would by twice as much. Do Republicans have a plan? Nope! Nothing! Republicans have nothing to offer and are happy with Texas style health care and you can be very sure that high fives will be apparent if the ACA gets killed.
If Obamacare gets killed, Americans will be looking “long and hard” at Republicans for an answer to our broken system. Health care in America is not sustainable as it exists today and, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Republican position, Republicans will be holding a very hot potato! In an election year, no less! All of this noise about repeal may backfire come the November elections. Let’s face it, Republicans are not known for their smarts. They usually screw up at the most strategic times. This may be one of those times. The American people, by a very substantial margin, want health care reformed in a very major way. Republicans don’t have a clue about how to do anything in a major way. They never have and they never will. By any measure, Republicans are Neanderthals.
Let them high five and chest bump. Let them gloat about derailing the PPACA -the first attempt to reform an unsustainable health system since Medicare. Let them take responsibility for denying over 50 million people access to health insurance. Let them be proud of derailing protections against denial of coverage and limiting of lifetime benefits. Let them revel in what will happen to insurance premiums, when health young people opt out of the system and insureres cannot utilize “community rating” to set premiums. I am a physician executive for a health system and am “in the trenches” every day. I am neither a liberal nor a socialist. I believe in individual reponsibility. I also believe that the current system is broken. As a society, we are failing to provide for the health of a significant monority of our population. Incentives are askew. We spend a remarkable amount on health care, yet don’t get the value we should for the dollars we spend. Given that the Republicans have not come up with a serious alternative to PPACA, let them celebrate maintaining the dismal status quo.
I think the quickest way to get to single-payer health care and end insurance industry control is for the Supreme Court to rule the entire Affordable Care Act (ACA) as unconstitutional. From the very beginning, Democrats in Congress made a huge mistake of allowing the insurance industry to craft the ACA from top to bottom. Republicans keep selling the ACA as a “massive government takeover” and nothing could be further from the truth. The ACA is a massive insurance industry takeover. Real reform involves removing the fox from the hen house. That means eliminating, as much as possible, the insurance industry. As long as our health care system is a profit driven system and a fee-for-service system, it will always be corrupt. As long as our health care system is a profit driven system and a fee-for-service system, it will always be costly for the consumer. Insurance companies have proven they can’t be trusted. Health care providers have proven that they can’t be trusted. Any time an industry becomes so corrupt, it needs government oversight. Just look at Wall Street as an example. Wall Street nearly ruined the world’s economy. The same will happen if we continue to allow greedy and corrupt insurers and greedy and corrupt health care providers to run America’s health care system.
Most Americans without health care don’t have the means are simply unlucky – and most Americans with good health are simply lucky.
The idea of getting as many people as possible into the risk pool is the basis for any successful mutual insurance model. It’s as old as insurance itself. The more people paying, the less risk there will be. It’s not rocket science. The individual mandate was a Republican idea since the late 1980′s. As much as the (ultra-conservative) Heritage Foundation is denying it today, it was their idea. It was a very good idea. This idea was introduced on the Senate floor by then GOP Senator John Chafee (R-RI) and he had 19 GOP co-sponsors with him. Speaker Newt Gingrich as a very vocal supporter of the individual mandate and wrote about it extensively. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney loved the individual mandate so much, he got a health care reform bill passed and enacted in Massachusetts with the individual mandate as the centerpiece of the bill. Today, Mitt Romney denies he ever liked the individual mandate. Of the more than 1500 independent private health insurers in America, virtually all of them say that without the individual mandate, every health care reform idea will fail because they need a very large risk pool for it to be successful. The real problem is, for all of the support that the individual mandate has gotten over the years by Republicans, for all of the strong proponents of the individual mandate before President Obama got sworn in as President, the individual will be forever banned as a tool to make health care reform successful if it gets struck down by the Supreme Court. Republicans, for some strange reason, are willing to throw the baby out with the bath water just to defeat President Obama in the November 2012 election. Republicans are willing to use a scorched earth tactic and ruin any chance of using the individual mandate ever again just to win at partisan politics.
FACT: If the high court rules the individual mandate dead next week, the individual mandate will be dead forever.
FACT: Republicans are willing to kill the idea that they strongly embraced before Obama became our President, all in the name of partisan politics.
FACT: This is the definition of insanity.
If the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare next week and we see all of the great existing benefits rescinded…
Existing benefits such as…
1) Donut Hole relief for the elderly
2) Children up to age 26 remaining of a parents policy
3) Free preventive health screenings for the elderly
4) Guaranteed issue even with pre-existing conditions
5) Refunds for overpayment of insurance premiums
If these great benefits disappear, Republicans will be in big trouble in the November election!
BIG TROUBLE!
Just rewatched the movie Soylent Green which is set in the year 2022 in NYC with a population of 40 million and people dying in the streets. There is a segment in the movie when Edward G. Robinson checked into the euthanasia clinic because he had found out that dead people were whisked off to the Soylent factory and made into edible nutrition wafers and just didn’t want to be a part of that kind of a world. It seemed to be nice place and he died with a smile on his face. Not bad! If SCOTUS takes us back to no plan to solve our healthcare crisis we might as well start building the euthanasia clinics.
Single payer, enhanced and improved MEDICARE for all could solve our healtcare crisis. It wouldn’t be perfect but it would be utopia compared to the healthcare hell we will have if there is no plan.