As the GOP has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act once again, this time tying it to the budget, Cathy McMorris Rodgers is taking a more active role in pushing it. I’ve really noticed that they aren’t pushing for anything. It’s been repeal, repeal, repeal, and now it’s defund and delay.
“To get the entire bill repealed, or defunded, is probably not realistic,” McMorris Rodgers said Thursday following a spirited town hall discussion in Spokane Wednesday night in which the Affordable Care Act took center stage. “But I do think there are provisions in the law that we can get delayed, or provisions in the law we can get defunded.”
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“I think there’s growing recognition that … portions of the law are not ready,” McMorris Rodgers said, citing recent votes in the House in which Democrats joined Republicans to delay the mandates in the law requiring employers and individuals to sign up on subsidized health insurance exchanges.
They are complaining and obstructing. They are demanding delay and attempting to defund the law. What they aren’t doing is proposing any alternative. The House GOP plan is to go back to before the health care law passed.
If you remember back when George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, the House and Senate Democrats were consistently opposed to his plan without offering any plan of their own. In that way, they made the status quo on Social Security their plan. They made Social Security the Democrats’ plan and privatizing it the Republican plan.
In the same way, the GOP plan for health care in America is how things were before Obamacare. The GOP plan is preexisting conditions and HMO’s. It’s tens of millions of Americans without health care coverage. It’s kicking kids off their parents’ plan. It’s shrinking of Medicaid and dissolving the other ways to make sure the poor can afford to be covered. It’s making it so that the power of the market doesn’t bring down costs in exchanges. It’s the out of control health care inflation that marked the period before the law passed. They ought to at least own up to that.