In which one GOP leader admits his party loves Obamacare and is a scam PAC (Horowitz)

[corbe]

In which one GOP leader admits his party loves Obamacare and is a scam PAC
 
By: Daniel Horowitz | April 05, 2017

It took weeks of debunking, exposing, and analyzing to cut through the grease of what many of us have known all along: Republicans love Obamacare, at least the core elements that destroyed insurance in America. They just enjoyed using Obamacare as a talking point for elections while in the opposition. This revelation should serve as a teachable moment, demonstrating to conservative voters once and for all that Republicans don’t share our values on almost any issue, let alone health care. The entire GOP is a massive scam PAC designed to use conservative issues as a flag to raise money, accrue power, and then sabotage those issues when in power.

Here is the raw truth from Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the House deputy majority whip:

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a member of House GOP leadership, said Wednesday that conservatives' proposals to reach a compromise on healthcare are a "bridge too far" to win support from colleagues.

McHenry, the chief deputy whip, told reporters that calls from the conservative House Freedom Caucus to allow states to apply for waivers to repeal ObamaCare protections for people with pre-existing conditions are a "bridge too far for our members" and can't get enough votes to pass.

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   Sahil Kapur
✔  ‎@sahilkapur 

GOP chief deputy whip P. McHenry says unwinding pre-ex mandates won’t fly in House, evokes his own experience with insurer discrimination.

1:55 PM - 5 Apr 2017

There you have it in plain English. The core elements of what made insurance actuarily insolvent and have destroyed health care in America are regarded as sacred by Republicans. Folks, there is no way to bridge that divide within the party.

 The sad thing is that Republicans never ran on this platform, nor did they inform us ahead of time that they loved Obamacare. The outcome of many primaries would have been different if they did. Instead, they ran on our views.
The GOP platform reflects the conservative position that government intervention is the source of the severity of the pre-existing condition problem. Between the lack of portability, the government-sponsored tethering of insurance to employment, Medicaid, Medicare, and endless state regulations on the supply side of health care, we are left without a normal market in the health care and health insurance sectors.

The conservative solution to future pre-existing conditions was always wrapped around many of the 20 ideas I’ve proposed to make insurance portable, competitive, work more like life insurance, and lower the cost of health care itself with supply side reforms. The way to deal with current pre-existing conditions was always to isolate and minimize the problem by lowering costs across the board for most people and separating out those with severe health problems in state high risk pools. Maine has produced a model for invisible high risk pools that has worked beautifully to lower costs for everyone (hat tip: Dean Clancy). Moreover, by freeing up the rest of the market to make insurance affordable and lower the cost of health care, younger people will pay into the system and do so at a younger age, thereby freeing up more funds to deal with the chronically ill. Yet, we have a party that campaigned on these ideas but never had any intention of following through with them.

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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/04/in-which-one-gop-leader-admits-his-party-loves-obamacare-and-is-a-scam-pac

[jmyrlefuller]

It's not so much they love it, they're simply scared of getting rid of it. They've let it become an entitlement, lost control of the message and went milquetoast just like they always do.

Daniel Horowitz makes an interesting point, perhaps in a roundabout way: Medicaid, like all of our other entitlement programs, is almost exclusively based on income, not on medical need. So someone with a pre-existing condition but a regular income gets bankrupted because all of that money is going toward medical expenses, while a young, healthy, working-class person qualifies for Medicaid he doesn't really need, which accomplishes nothing.

It's yet another example of misguided goals (see also: "coverage" being the end-all and be-all).