The Republican Health Care Bill Is Carefully Crafted to Solve a Specific Problem

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In my post this morning about the Republican health care bill, I was going to make a snarky comment about its weakness being driven partly by the Republican desire to avoid anything like the “2,700 page” ACA, which they’ve been griping about for years. But I desisted. There’s no need to get sarcastic when there are plenty of substantive criticisms to make. But then we get this:

These guys never give up. But just for the record, it takes a lot of pages to set up a healthcare system. It takes one sentence to repeal it. That’s why the Republican bill is so short.

And as long as we’re on the subject, Ezra Klein says this today:

The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve

Ezra makes a bunch of good points, and his piece is worth reading. But I disagree with him. There’s no way to say this without sounding hopelessly partisan, so I’ll just say it: Republicans knew exactly what problem they were trying to solve. Their preference has always been to repeal Obamacare and do nothing in its place, but they don’t have the votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster, so they can’t do that. They also realize that the optics of baldly ripping away health coverage from 20 million people would be mildly troublesome.

So their goal was simple: do what they could to destroy Obamacare and take away as much health coverage as they could, without making it look like they weren’t offering a replacement. The result is a plan that offers the trappings of health care—subsidies, pre-existing conditions, etc.—but which is all but useless to the people who actually need it. It’s too stingy for poor people, and mostly unnecessary for middle-class folks who already get health insurance from their employers. It will cost very little because virtually nobody will use it.

The part they apparently didn’t realize is that keeping the pre-existing conditions clause—which is both popular and impossible to repeal—while tearing down the rest of Obamacare is likely to destroy the individual insurance market. At least, I assume they didn’t realize that, since this would be bad news even by Republican standards. I don’t know what, if anything, they plan to do about that. Maybe nothing. Maybe they’re just counting on their repeal bill failing in the Senate, so nothing bad will happen and they can get back to complaining about Obamacare.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate