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"As bi-partisan as you can get"? C'mon, that claim doesn't pass the laugh test. Plenty of legislation has passed both houses of Congress in the last five years

"As bi-partisan as you can get"? C'mon, that claim doesn't pass the laugh test. Plenty of legislation has passed both houses of Congress in the last five years with large bi-partisan majorities. Leahy-Smith[1] is just the first one I thought of. As for it being "the Republicans' plan", you're hanging an awful lot on some Republicans' support for an individual mandate (conceived, remember, in opposition to Bill Clinton's nascent proposals for an employer mandate) twenty years ago. The guy who most Republicans actually voted for wanted to change the system to allow health care plans to be sold across state lines, and de-couple employment and health care via a universal individual tax credit [2]. Neither of those are in PPACA. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy-Smith_America_Invents_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy-Smith_America_Invents_Act [2] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/10/the-mccain-health-care-plan-more-power-to-families http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/10/the-mccain-...

mikeash 13y ago
"As bi-partisan as you can get" is intended to be in the context of health care reform. Sure, you can get bi-partisan support for funding veteran death benefits or whatever, but that's not what I'm talking about. The Republicans created the current plan. The most recent Republican candidate for President supported and passed this plan in his home state when he was governor. It's a Republican plan. The Republicans have no serious alternative proposal. They pretend they do only to the extent needed to convince people who aren't paying attention that they really mean the "replace" part of "repeal and replace". Sure, Obamacare isn't exactly the Republican plan in 100% of every detail. It's still the basic Republican plan overall, and the Republicans are not wrangling over details anyway.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Ross Douthat has a pretty good summary of at least the egghead Republican health care policy preference and its pros and cons. The whole thing is worth reading. http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/why-not-medicaid-for-all/?_r=0 http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/why-not-medicaid... Short version: Subsidized catastrophic care for real "insurance", and tax-advantaged HSA's for your more predictable medical costs. The former probably still requires something like the existing individual mandate, so it's unfortunate that Republicans seized on that as one of their primary objections to PPACA (an objection that Candidate Obama shared in 2008!) More practically, a Republican alternative would certainly not have made these catastrophic plans currently being cancelled illegal. This stuff is not fiddling around the margins: PPACA will only work if it substantially shifts costs from the old and sick (who need comprehensive plans) to the young and healthy (who would typically be fine with catastrophic ones). I don't know why you would expect the GOP to be happy about a wealth transfer like that, particularly when they couldn't expect to extract any leverage from their participation with a Democratic super-majority able to pass whatever it could agree on. All for a bill whose popular support never seriously cracked 50%? I wish Democrats had engaged with President Bush in '05 when he came out of the reelect gate for Social Security reform, rather then declare the whole thing DOA. But I certainly am not shocked they behaved like an opposition.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    If that article really is a pretty good summary of Republican thinking in this sphere, then I'd say it completely backs up what I've been saying. There's not much substance in that article. It very briefly mentions the subsidized catastrophic insurance you mention, but it doesn't go into much detail at all. Worse, it completely handwaves away the major problem with that model, namely, what happens to people with chronic conditions, by basically saying "oh well, too bad, so sad." In any case, I don't see how that approach is ultimately very different. Sure, it means people cover a bit more stuff out of pocket, and places a higher burden on sick poor people, but overall it's pretty much the same. The ultimate question that has to be answered is this: do we, as a society, find it acceptable to allow people to die of treatable illnesses when they can't afford to pay for the treatment? This question has been solidly answered as "no" in the US for some decades now, ever since hospitals were barred from turning away patients in the emergency room. The question now is simply how you accomplish it. So, back to these subsidized catastrophic plans. You'll have to have a mandate on them! Without a mandate, people who aren't sick won't buy them unless you hold some other threat over their head, such as denying them the ability to obtain insurance if they're already sick. Unless we're going to let people die, the wealth transfer you describe has to happen in some way. Pre-Obamacare, it works using a de-facto hidden employment tax whereby better-off people pay, in a really convoluted fashion, for the unpaid bills of poor people. With Obamacare, it works by forcing people to get insurance even if they don't want it. The Republican idea discussed in your link is some combination of the two, and exactly what the combination is depends on the exact details. Obamacare is just about the most free-market solution for universal health coverage you can come up with. It's more free-market than the pre-Obamacare regime, it was proposed by Republicans, and it was passed by Republicans in Massachusetts just a few years prior to becoming law at the national level. And lest we think that those Massachusetts Republicans were some fringe group, they nominated the governor for President! Why should I expect Republicans to object to it for any reason other than being the political party of Crazy?
    - hga 13y ago
      "If that article really is a pretty good summary of Republican thinking in this sphere...." Ross Douthat is one of the New York Times tame "conservatives"; I haven't read that particular piece by him, especially since I'm not familiar with all the proposals by various people on that side so I can't critique it, but I can say you can't denounce our side on the basis of anything he portrays. "[Obamacare] was passed by Republicans in Massachusetts just a few years prior to becoming law at the national level." This must be some new definition of the word passed I wasn't previously acquainted with. The quickest refutation is can find is that the lower house has been Democratic since 1955. In 2006, 35 out of the 40 upper house seats were held by Democrats. It has long been a one party state by the time I showed up in 1979, with the occasional RINOs for flavor. Anyway, you keep claiming things can be "bi-partisan" without Republican votes, a result that can only be achieved by twisting the word beyond recognition.

mikeash 13y ago

"As bi-partisan as you can get" is intended to be in the context of health care reform. Sure, you can get bi-partisan support for funding veteran death benefits or whatever, but that's not what I'm talking about. The Republicans created the current plan. The most recent Republican candidate for President supported and passed this plan in his home state when he was governor. It's a Republican plan. The Republicans have no serious alternative proposal. They pretend they do only to the extent needed to convince people who aren't paying attention that they really mean the "replace" part of "repeal and replace". Sure, Obamacare isn't exactly the Republican plan in 100% of every detail. It's still the basic Republican plan overall, and the Republicans are not wrangling over details anyway.

twoodfin 13y ago
Ross Douthat has a pretty good summary of at least the egghead Republican health care policy preference and its pros and cons. The whole thing is worth reading. http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/why-not-medicaid-for-all/?_r=0 http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/why-not-medicaid... Short version: Subsidized catastrophic care for real "insurance", and tax-advantaged HSA's for your more predictable medical costs. The former probably still requires something like the existing individual mandate, so it's unfortunate that Republicans seized on that as one of their primary objections to PPACA (an objection that Candidate Obama shared in 2008!) More practically, a Republican alternative would certainly not have made these catastrophic plans currently being cancelled illegal. This stuff is not fiddling around the margins: PPACA will only work if it substantially shifts costs from the old and sick (who need comprehensive plans) to the young and healthy (who would typically be fine with catastrophic ones). I don't know why you would expect the GOP to be happy about a wealth transfer like that, particularly when they couldn't expect to extract any leverage from their participation with a Democratic super-majority able to pass whatever it could agree on. All for a bill whose popular support never seriously cracked 50%? I wish Democrats had engaged with President Bush in '05 when he came out of the reelect gate for Social Security reform, rather then declare the whole thing DOA. But I certainly am not shocked they behaved like an opposition.
- mikeash 13y ago
  If that article really is a pretty good summary of Republican thinking in this sphere, then I'd say it completely backs up what I've been saying. There's not much substance in that article. It very briefly mentions the subsidized catastrophic insurance you mention, but it doesn't go into much detail at all. Worse, it completely handwaves away the major problem with that model, namely, what happens to people with chronic conditions, by basically saying "oh well, too bad, so sad." In any case, I don't see how that approach is ultimately very different. Sure, it means people cover a bit more stuff out of pocket, and places a higher burden on sick poor people, but overall it's pretty much the same. The ultimate question that has to be answered is this: do we, as a society, find it acceptable to allow people to die of treatable illnesses when they can't afford to pay for the treatment? This question has been solidly answered as "no" in the US for some decades now, ever since hospitals were barred from turning away patients in the emergency room. The question now is simply how you accomplish it. So, back to these subsidized catastrophic plans. You'll have to have a mandate on them! Without a mandate, people who aren't sick won't buy them unless you hold some other threat over their head, such as denying them the ability to obtain insurance if they're already sick. Unless we're going to let people die, the wealth transfer you describe has to happen in some way. Pre-Obamacare, it works using a de-facto hidden employment tax whereby better-off people pay, in a really convoluted fashion, for the unpaid bills of poor people. With Obamacare, it works by forcing people to get insurance even if they don't want it. The Republican idea discussed in your link is some combination of the two, and exactly what the combination is depends on the exact details. Obamacare is just about the most free-market solution for universal health coverage you can come up with. It's more free-market than the pre-Obamacare regime, it was proposed by Republicans, and it was passed by Republicans in Massachusetts just a few years prior to becoming law at the national level. And lest we think that those Massachusetts Republicans were some fringe group, they nominated the governor for President! Why should I expect Republicans to object to it for any reason other than being the political party of Crazy?
  - hga 13y ago
    "If that article really is a pretty good summary of Republican thinking in this sphere...." Ross Douthat is one of the New York Times tame "conservatives"; I haven't read that particular piece by him, especially since I'm not familiar with all the proposals by various people on that side so I can't critique it, but I can say you can't denounce our side on the basis of anything he portrays. "[Obamacare] was passed by Republicans in Massachusetts just a few years prior to becoming law at the national level." This must be some new definition of the word passed I wasn't previously acquainted with. The quickest refutation is can find is that the lower house has been Democratic since 1955. In 2006, 35 out of the 40 upper house seats were held by Democrats. It has long been a one party state by the time I showed up in 1979, with the occasional RINOs for flavor. Anyway, you keep claiming things can be "bi-partisan" without Republican votes, a result that can only be achieved by twisting the word beyond recognition.