The ObamaCare Debate Begins Anew : Kimberly Strassel
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10907564710791284872504581070280143257282
This week’s Supreme Court ruling sets up the 2016 presidential election perfectly for Republicans.
The one fun part of this week’s Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare is that it has given the country a new way to evaluate everything Democrats say. Take Barack Obama’s pronouncement Thursday that the court’s ruling in King v. Burwell means “the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”
Those words are pretty clear. Mr. Obama surely meant them. Yet all we have to do is give them the old Roberts High Court treatment, and—voilà!—we discover the exact opposite meaning. Far from putting this debate behind us, the ruling has freed Washington to take it up. Now that the long months of waiting silently and expectantly for the court’s decision are over, debate on ObamaCare is about to explode in a way not witnessed since 2010.
The reason rests in another of Mr. Obama’s statements Thursday: “there can be no doubt this law is working.” Apply those Roberts Rules of Plain Textual Interpretation, and we find that what the president means is that families are still losing their doctors, still getting hit with double-digit premium hikes. What he means is that the law remains as unpopular as ever.
Opinion Journal Video
The Republican presidential candidates know this, and the court’s ruling has made their job easier politically. Few had issued their own health-care proposals. The rest were waiting to see the state of the terrain after King v. Burwell. Many also privately fretted that if the court struck down ObamaCare subsidies, Republicans would fail to coalesce around a response, and the GOP would then take the blame for the turmoil that followed.
That risk is gone, and the GOP candidates now have a clear field to present the presidential race as another referendum on ObamaCare. Only this time there will be no Romney-like nominee with a health-care history that tanks his ability to engage. And despite some disagreements, Republicans have steadily erected over the past five years a set of strong, core principles for reform. The candidates will soon be issuing (if they haven’t already) comprehensive proposals, setting up ObamaCare to be the most high-profile, defining domestic issue of 2016—in a way it never came close to being in 2012.
That is in part because Republicans will be having the debate with a woman who doesn’t own—but rather is inheriting—this law. Hillary Clinton has already been reassuring nervous Americans that she envisions some “fixes” for ObamaCare. Were John Roberts to look very, very closely at that word—meditate on it a few months or a year—he’d tell you that what Mrs. Clinton is actually saying is that she will defend ObamaCare down to the ground, advocating only the most minor tweaks.
What else can she do? She cannot ditch Mr. Obama’s legacy, the crowning achievement of the modern Democratic Party. Nor would she want to, as the author of its precursor, HillaryCare. And yet this means she will have to defend it: not only the mess (the high costs, the lost doctors) but also the White House’s extralegal approach to handling the law’s flaws. The contrast—between a Democrat who could start over but won’t, and a Republican who has a real plan for change—will be a new and important sight for voters.
Of course, even Mr. Obama on Thursday acknowledged that “we’ve still got work to do to make health care in America even better.” The pure Roberts reading of this line would be: “Watch me now block every partisan and bipartisan effort to fix this disaster.” And there will be many, in part because the court’s ruling refires the starting gun for congressional Republicans, who will begin by passing later this summer or in early fall a full repeal of ObamaCare as part of their budget reconciliation (which requires only 51 Senate votes). Mr. Obama will veto it, but the GOP will finally be able to say that it put repeal on his desk. Less certain is whether Republicans will move a “replace” plan given divisions over its exact contours and concerns that these splits could put GOP disarray back in the spotlight.
The more interesting work will come in their bills to force incremental change, a number of which have Democratic support. The House last week passed repeal of the medical-device tax with 46 Democrats joining Republicans. When the Senate had a test vote on that question in 2013, repeal received 79 votes, more than enough to override a presidential veto. Meanwhile, the House this week voted to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board—the Obama “death panel.” Eleven Democrats joined to kill it, and Republicans are expecting at least some Democratic support in the Senate.
There will be far more of these bills as Republicans use their new control in the upper chamber to force Democrats to take positions on key parts of the law. Some of these attempts may even succeed.
So no, the Affordable Care Act, in its present form, is hardly “here to stay”; the law isn’t “working”; Mr. Obama isn’t going to make it “even better”; and Hillary isn’t going to “fix” it. Those all rank with Mr. Obama’s declaration that the court’s decision made Thursday “a good day for America.” Run that one through the Roberts typewriter. And try not to get too depressed.
Comments are closed.
