Megan McArdle doesn’t view this latest attempt to “fix” Obamacare with any great optimism:
Mitch McConnell is once again announcing that the Senate is going to come out with a new health-care bill and try to hold a vote next week. That exhaustion you feel is the same despair that seeps over you when a pair of ill-matched friends announce for the 17th time that they’re getting back together.
As with those friends (we all have them, don’t we?) there seems to be no set of mutual goals upon which a durable partnership can be built. Many Republican legislators want Obamacare to die. Others would probably attend the funeral with ill-concealed delight, but they don’t want a reputation for having killed it. Still others would like to be able to tell voters that they “did something” about Obamacare, even though in reality they are loath to actually, you know, do something — because their states would lose money, or voters would lose insurance.
[Wearily] So what can be done here? Realistically.
As an exercise on paper, the answer is easy:
- Stop trying to make this a tax-cut bill, and focus on reforms that can pave the way to fiscal stability, and dismantling many of the perverse incentives that have so distorted our health-care system.
- Leave Obamacare’s taxes intact. (Yes, even the dumb ones, of which there are many.)
- Turn Medicaid into a fixed grant rather than an open-ended entitlement, either by making it a block grant, or switching to a flat per-beneficiary payout — but don’t try to make block grants a confusing cover for very deep cuts to the program.
- Provide generous funding to stabilize the individual health-insurance exchanges, but demand in return very wide latitude for states to decide how they stabilize their insurance markets — including jettisoning any of the Obamacare regulations they think are getting in the way.
- Meanwhile, move the system more aggressively toward health-savings accounts plus catastrophic insurance — and get Democrats on board by offering to have the government fund some portion of those health savings accounts for low-income citizens.
Is that my ideal health-care system? No. But it gives Republicans some of what they want (a more consumer-driven, pro-market program in the individual market, and a big start toward reforming the bloated and byzantine mess that is the Medicaid program). It gives Democrats some of what they want (money for people who don’t have very much of it, plus they don’t get splattered by the fallout of Obamacare exchanges melting down). In theory, it could pass.
And in theory, I could play third base for the Yankees, if Joe Girardi were willing to hire me. The truth is that after years of complaining about obstructionism, Democrats have developed a sudden taste for the stuff; there’s a substantial faction of both politicians and voters who want the Democrats to stand by and do nothing, nothing, that Republicans might like. And even among those who think they want bipartisan compromise — well, I spend a lot of time listening to those folks, and when you get down to it, frequently their idea of a “compromise” is that they get a huge government program that costs hundreds of billions of dollars, and Republicans get trivial increases in the size of health-savings accounts, and maybe to twiddle with a few of the outer decimal points on growth rates. In other words, what they think is a vision of compromise is too often actually a vision of America ca. 1992, when Republicans were a minority party who had to come begging for crumbs.
