Perhaps the single most unifying platform of the Republican Party — the rallying cry that is holding the otherwise fractured and floundering party together — a universal disdain for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. “Repeal Obamacare” was one of the driving forces of Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and is currently the pet project of the highly unpopular Republican-led House of Representatives.
80 Republican congressmen have signed a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) urging him to disallow any vote to fund the new health care law — a request that will almost certainly lead to a partial shutdown of the federal government, as President Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Senate will never sign off on a bill that fails to fund the health care law they championed.
In short, the current projection of the Republican Party is to destroy Obamacare at all costs, even if the country as a whole suffers because of it. This could be understandable, if not laudable, if Obamacare ran contrary to conservative principles — principles that Republicans believed necessary for the well-being and future prosperity of our nation.
If Republicans had a more prudent idea, a more conservative idea, to rectify the current health care disaster our country faces, rather than a slogan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, they might actually be able to unify themselves. The only problem is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, hidden underneath the partisan and destructive labels Republicans continuously throw at it, was — and is — the conservative alternative.
What cannot be emphasized enough is that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a free-market approach to reforming our current health care system. It creates no form of government (or “socialized”) insurance akin to what we see in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Instead, it relies on the workings of the market — health care exchanges where insurances can be accessed and compared state-wide and credit programs to make business investment more accessible and efficient — to drive down the cost of health care and make it more affordable for the average American.
The relationship between insurance companies and health care has always been dubious, but instead of embarking on a complete overhaul of the private system of insurance, the health reform law turns to regulation — the conservative approach to failing markets — to keep the insurance companies in check.
Perhaps the central tenet of the health reform law is the requirement that insurance companies cannot use pre-existing health conditions to discriminate and reject certain patients. This is a tenet that is almost universally accepted in the United States, including the approval of 78 percent of Republicans.
This is a provision that nearly every Republican leader in the House and Senate has said they would keep in the health reform law — Romney even threw his support behind it. However, simple economics shows that in order to have a provision that requires health insurance companies to cover patients with pre-existing illnesses, mandates — which reconcile the onset of unhealthy patients with an equal or greater onset of healthy patients — must be enacted to ensure that insurance companies do not go bankrupt.
Moreover, once a mandate is put into place, greater subsidies must be enacted (or Medicaid expanded) to account for the thousands of new people that are now forced to buy health insurance but cannot afford it on their own.
This is a simple logic chain that has been explained time and time again by economists, businessmen and politicians alike — including the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, conservative Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, and the “old” Romney, when he implemented the plan as governor of Massachusetts. We cannot have a provision that requires health insurance to accept patients with pre-existing conditions without a health insurance mandate and increased subsidies to those who cannot afford the care.
The current state of the Republican Party is to recant, denounce and bemoan the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act while at the same time cherishing all of the fundamental aspects of the law. They love the free market insurance exchanges and the requirement that allows everyone to receive coverage regardless of pre-existing illnesses, yet these provisions necessitate the aspects of the law they are simultaneously and hypocritically denouncing.
Republicans are playing politics, and their blatant insincerity is becoming destructive by refusing to admit that their alternative to “Obamacare” is the exact same bill.