The Affordable Care Act is going to survive.
The 2010 health care law has slowly but surely moved out of the line of fire. President Trump barely mentioned it in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. At their annual retreat this week in West Virginia, top Republicans signaled that the repeal dream is likely over.
After Doug Jones won the Alabama special Senate election in December, the bare Republican Senate majority has no viable path left for a more substantial repeal plan; the math in a 51-seat majority is too daunting. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) remain opposed to taking up repeal. Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already said that Republicans would probably move on from health care.
So the party’s long-held promise to repeal Obamacare root and branch appears to be actually, finally dead. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Trump claiming, after his party’s tax overhaul passed in December with a repeal of the law’s individual mandate, that Republicans “have essentially repealed Obamacare.” But he’s wrong about that.
Repealing the individual mandate is a legitimate blow to the Obamacare marketplaces, but doing so won’t unravel the markets entirely. They will function worse than they did before, and premiums will likely rise.
But millions of people who receive generous tax subsidies to buy coverage will not feel the brunt of those cost increases. The law’s rules prohibiting health insurers from discriminating against preexisting conditions remain on the books. Finally, and most importantly, Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which covered upward of 15 million people, remains untouched.
Well there's an island of good news in this sea of insanity at least.
Still, as pointed out in the article, the Affordable Care Act has been badly damaged, and it needs to be repaired and fine tuned.
Neither of those things will happen with a Republican majority in the House and Senate, so we desperately need to turn out the vote in 2018, and then again in 2020.
And whatever we do we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted with bullshit purity tests and Democratic infighting.
We are often our own worst enemies, but right now there are far more dangerous adversaries with which to deal.
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