The way Republicans talk about it, you’d think health care reform was the black plague.
I’m noticing a new tactic, however. Instead of trying to repeal health care reform outright, they instead are trying to eliminate the individual mandate. What they don’t tell you is that without universal health insurance, costs will really skyrocket. And once that happens, they can then get rid of health care reform entirely.
4 Comments
So are they in the pockets of the insurance companies or not? If yes, this doesn’t make any goddamned sense.
CGE, I always thought that it was the Democrats who got more money from insurance. Either way, the Republicans picked a fight and the have to get something changed to appeal to their base. In the end, it may be a game of chicken: they don’t want the individual mandate removed but they also want to pretend to be aganist it.
THink about the last tax bill. The Democrats could have easily avoided given the waelthy the same tax breaks as everyone else (ie let the top tax bracket regress to it’s pre-Bush rate), but they instead waited until after the midterm elections to tackle this issue, when they knew it would be harder to get done.
The individual mandate is not due to anyone’s being in the pocket of the insurance industry. It’s the only solution that works unless you go to a single-payer system, because insurance is based on sharing risks and without a large base of healthy people paying into the pool, no insurance scheme can afford to cover people that are sick. That’s why if the individual mandate is overturned, broader coverage for the uninsured will not be possible and there will be potential skyrocketing costs due to the requirements for no pre-existing conditions, etc.
The sad part of all this is that the “right” health care solution (right from a logical, business process engineering standpoint only) is some variant of a single-payer system, and that’s the one solution that no one in the health care industry itself supports – and therefore is politically impossible to implement unless voters rise up and put enough people into office at the same time to push it through.
The legal arguments will prove interesting and nothing that the Congress tries to do about the health care changes will be meaningful until the Supreme Court rules on the mandate. I wonder if Clarence Thomas will recuse himself when it gets there, and if he doesn’t I wonder if we will see a judicial crisis as a result.
Totally agree, Jason.