There are good ones in there like Dave Brat. Hopefully, they can come up with a plan that removes the mandate and taxes and weans the subsidies .
Getting rid of the the mandate in its current form would moot the damage that John Roberts did.
The House proposal DOES get rid of the mandates and weans the subsidies. Of course, that likely won't be enough for the Freedom Caucus, and that will effectively force the proposal to move to the center/left to pick up the votes that the FC will deny the bill.
The individual mandate was perhaps the least offensive aspect of the ACA, and its symbolic power to the TEA party right has always puzzled me. (The employer mandate, which it appears will also be scrapped under the House proposal, really did cost jobs and constrained economic growth. I have always supported the individual mandate as sound policy to expand the insurance pool; heck, I supported it back in the seventies.)
The Freedom Caucus is betting that the Dems won't help pass a reform bill, thereby permitting the ACA to die of its own weight. Of course, when anything dies of its own weight, the demise is painful and the recriminations will be felt by the politicians who are perceived as having allowed the pain to occur. So the GOP is now faced with three basic scenarios going forward:
- Pass a unified reform bill that includes the support of the FC. That seems, well, extraordinarily difficult given the reality that FC members, safe in their gerrymandered districts populated by social conservatives, are unlikely to sign on to anything resembling an actual fix.
- Pass a bipartisan reform bill, jettisoning the FC but moving left to pick up the support of some Democrats. This would ordinarily be the most likely scenario - it's certainly the way things used to get done. But the Dems want the GOP to own this tar-baby, and their leadership will likely lean hard on more moderate Dems to screw the GOP over, much as the GOP refused to assist in the crafting of ObamaCare (even as that bill adopted the individual mandate that was originally proposed by conservatives in the seventies.) The Dems know that they'll be rewarded for successful obstruction, just as the GOP was during the Obama years.
- Fail to pass legislation, with the ACA remaining on life support. Here, the Trump administration will play a role, since the legislation punted on a number of matters to the bureaucracy to craft regulations. Those regulations can bring some relief, but the job-killing mandates won't go away unless the law is changed. This is the scenario which is most fraught with electoral peril. If the GOP can't fix the ACA, the spectre of a Dem takeover as early as 2018 looms. Don't forget that the American people know full well that Republicans control both the Presidency and the Congress. Results are expected, and results are what counts, and a lack of results will be duly punished.
