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And it doesn't repeal much.

So-called 'skinny repeal' might be the only scenario that can pass the Senate



There's no way to put a happy face on this. The Republican-controlled Senate is not 100 percent populated by frauds and poseurs. But it has enough of them that with only 52 members in the first place, there's no way it can cobble together 50 votes to do anything serious to deal with ObamaCare. Either GOP moderate/liberals like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman and Dean Heller will protect the growing entitlement state, or conservatives like Mike Lee and (sometimes) Ted Cruz will refuse to vote for anything that's not perfect. And libertarian fraud Rand Paul, who isn't even a real Republican, won't vote for anything that doesn't comport to his utopian vision for America. Thus, he won't vote for anything.
And you thought the House was bad. And it was. But the House found a way to pass a bill that at least contained some serious policy achievements. Does the Senate still have a chance to do the same? It doesn't sound like it. Current thinking is that the only thing that might have a chance to pass is a so-called "skinny repeal," which gets rid of only a few of ObamaCare's most oderous elements. Here's a basic rundown on what that would look like:
This is also called the “lowest common denominator” plan, as it would include only items that at least 50 Republicans agree on. It would repeal the ACA’s requirements that individuals have insurance and employers provide it, and it would rescind the ACA tax on medical devices. That means the 2010 law’s subsidies and Medicaid expansion would stay in place, as would the ACA’s insurance regulations, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions untouched.
This isn't completely useless, although it doesn't solve the biggest problems inherent to ObamaCare. The individual mandate is not only unconstitutional but inherently harmful to many Americans, as it forces them to buy a product they don't want, and that almost always costs them more in premiums than they would lay out if they just paid for their health care with their own money. This is why so many people don't want to buy health insurance. It's not a good value. If health insurance was changed to put the focus on protection against major risk, it could become a good value. But it hasn't been that way for a very long time, and forcing people to buy it is a travesty.

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Forcing employers to pay for your health insurance has been a job killer. With companies forced to provide health insurance once they have 50 employees, many pull back from reaching that level. I don't disagree that it's a good employment practice to provide health insurance in the current labor market, but companies can decide for themselves if it makes sense for them. Employees can decide for themselves if that's something they need with their jobs. The federal government doesn't need to be involved in that equation, and ObamaCare puts it square in the middle of it. As for the medical device tax, that is one of many ObamaCare elements that is driving up the cost of health care and sucking capital out of an important sector of the economy. It's long been recognized as one of the worst taxes imposed by the law, and the sooner it's gone the better. So sure, all three of these moves would be good ones. If they're all we can get, we should take them. But it still leaves the basic structure of ObamaCare in place, and that is a very bad thing. It still puts the taxpayers on the hook for subsidizing millions of people's premiums. It leaves a myriad of other new taxes in place, along with a locked-in spending trajectory that will prove toxic to federal budgeting efforts in coming years. And it maintains the faltering ObamaCare exchanges, along with the requirement the economically insane requirement that insurers take all comers regardless of pre-existing conditions, and at the same rates as everyone else. This is the reason Democrats included the individual mandate. They knew that insurers could not afford to cover people who were already sick, and taxpayers couldn't possibly cover the necessary subsidies, unless you forced healthy people into the same pool to help pick up the costs. That's a complete assault on the rights of people to make their own economic choices, but since when do Democrats care about that?

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Repealing the individual mandate is the right thing to do, but the "skinny repeal" still leaves all these larger problems in place. Honestly, I question whether you can get 50 Republicans to vote for even this. Are Collins and Murkowski really going to end their quest to save as much of ObamaCare as they can? Is Rand Paul suddenly going to decide to make some small portion of his utopian fantasy reality rather than just talking about it all the time? Is Mike Lee prepared to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the kinda sorta good? It's sad beyond measure that we've come to the point where this is the best we can do. If there's any silver lining to this pile of crap, it would be the hope that repealing the individual mandate introduces that much more instability into the market, and the GOP can't help but come back in the near future and deal with the rest of it. But whether they deal with it in a manner that actually makes things better is another question entirely - especially if subsequent bills don't qualify for reconciliation and thus require 60 votes. (Republicans could get rid of the filibuster at any time, of course, but they refuse to do so.) The Senate has let the country down, mainly because of the actions of seven or eight senators who have no interest in solving the real problems this awful law has inflicted on the nation. Rooting at this point for something as empty as the "skinny repeal" feels like hoping to win a few games at the end of the season to stay out of last place. I guess it's all we have left.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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