The Repeal-And-Delay Box Canyon

GOP senators like Bob Corker are awakening to the reality that their plan for dealing with Obamacare will require tax increases.

U.S. News & World Report

The Repeal-And-Delay Box Canyon

Michael Bonfigli for The Christian Science Monitor

Here's a suggestion for the GOP.

Add Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker to the growing list of Republicans skeptical of the "repeal-and-delay" strategy the party leadership is contemplating regarding Obamacare. It could lead the GOP into a "box canyon," the folksy lawmaker said, where they have to – gulp – vote for tax increases.

Repeal and delay is the party leadership's attempt to deal with several competing political realities. The first is that they've promised up and down that at the first possible chance they'd repeal the law. ("I'm sorry, I know that much of the repeal piece is about making a political point, much of the repeal piece is about drawing a line in the sand," Corker admitted.) The second is that you can't just strip 20 million some-odd people of health insurance coverage and call it a day – you need to come up with your own "terrific" alternative, to borrow Donald Trump's phrasing, that won't reverse the enormous gains in covering the uninsured that have been made under Obamacare. But the third hard reality is that seven years and countless our plan is just weeks away promises later, the GOP still hasn't produced an actual alternative. Mostly because they can't.

Hence repeal and delay – get points for repealing but punt the actual implementation three or more years down the road to give the party more time to, really, seriously, come up with a plan. In the meantime, Corker said, "it's become standard Republican orthodoxy" that low-income Americans will continue to receive some sort of help buying health insurance while we transition from the awful Obamacare system to the glorious GOP replacement where just as many people are insured but at less cost thanks to unicorn magic.

But repealing now without an actual replacement plan in place brings with it a host of problems, including the possibility of chaos in the insurance industry and, as a political matter, Republicans suddenly owning whatever goes wrong in health care. That's why Corker's not alone in his skepticism – GOP senators like Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky have also questioned the wisdom of the plan.

Corker pointed out another hard reality, this one budgetary. The repeal currently being pushed involves budget reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. But that means that it's not a full repeal – they can repeal the tax side of the law but not the regulatory side. And if helping low-income Americans buy health insurance is now a given for the GOP, well that costs money. "Right now on the track we're on, the repeal process is going to repeal all revenues but keep in place the subsidies for three years," he noted. "What you're doing [then is] you're taking $116 billion by our calculations and just throwing it into a mud puddle by continuing subsidies without revenues."

Corker, for one, thinks that ballooning deficits are a bad thing. Most of his colleagues at least theoretically agree, though as Robert's 10th rule of politics states, a party's dedication to fiscal responsibility is inversely proportional to its political power. One party in charge at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue tend not to care so much about deficits.

But for kicks let's grant an unlikely level of intellectual honesty and fiscal responsibility. "So if you repeal all the revenues on the front end … and you're going to pay subsidies for three years and throw $116 billion in a mud puddle; also to continue past that ... that means Republicans would have to vote for a tax increase," Corker said. "I don't know many of my Republican friends including me that are anxious to go out and vote for a tax increase, but if you repeal 'em all on the front end and then you extend it beyond three years that's exactly the box canyon that you find yourself in, right?"

Note here the concession that there's a good likelihood that three years won't be enough time to produce a replacement plan. He said it could become like the "doc fix" bill that would pass every year delayed adjustments in Medicare reimbursements – it made good fiscal sense but brought too much political pain so Congress kept delaying it indefinitely.

So if repeal and replace has become repeal and delay, which could become repeal in name only, what's to become of Obamacare? Corker held out the prospect of basically making it a repeal in name only (RINO!) not through punting but tweaking. He said that if only Democrats would be willing to come to the table maybe a compromise could be hammered out in three areas: getting rid of the individual and corporate mandates, adjusting the list of essential benefits and giving governors more flexibility with Medicaid. "If you looked at those three things, that would be monumental as it relates to causing what has occurred to work," he said.

His bemoaning Democrats' refusing to compromise about Obamacare is rich. Corker's party has been the one holding a hard line where any solution short of full-stop-repeal has been denounced as caving in to tyranny. Democrats, starting with President Barack Obama, have repeatedly said that the law has problems which can be fixed only to have the GOP reply in near-unison that the only acceptable fix is repeal. I can't say whether it's even possible for a compromise to be reached on those three areas, but pointing to specific problems is a distinct step away from dismissing the entire law as an unfixable mess is an evolution.

Maybe the realities of governing will lead more GOPers to start making that distinction. Maybe – though it's probably not likely in today's Washington – "repeal" will end up being reform instead.

In the mean time I have a suggestion for the GOP: Instead of repeal-and-delay, try delay-and-repeal. Give yourselves a deadline three years hence to come up with a replacement that doesn't end up kicking millions of people off of their health care. (Ask yourselves: Under our plan if people like their doctor and/or health insurance will they be able to keep it?) If you meet that deadline, repeal away; if you can't meet that deadline then promise to shut up about repeal once and for all.

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