There’s a crucial difference between the Loch Ness Monster and any Republican health-care-reform plan worthy of the name: Nessie almost certainly does not exist, but the GOP plan cannot exist. That, essentially, was the message of a Monday blog post by New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.
“It is impossible to design a health-care plan that is both consistent with conservative ideology and acceptable to the broader public,” asserted Chait. “People who can’t afford health insurance are either unusually sick…unusually poor…or both…You can cover poor people by giving them money. And you can cover sick people by requiring insurers to sell plans to people regardless of age or preexisting conditions. Obamacare uses both of these methods. But Republicans oppose spending more money on the poor, and they oppose regulation, which means they don’t want to do either of them.”
From Chait’s post (bolding added):
Republicans have been promising that they were on the cusp of unveiling a party-wide alternative to the Obama administration’s health-care reform since the debate began in 2009, but they have never quite managed to do so…
The reason the dog keeps eating the Republicans’ health-care homework is very simple: It is impossible to design a health-care plan that is both consistent with conservative ideology and acceptable to the broader public. People who can’t afford health insurance are either unusually sick (meaning their health-care costs are high), unusually poor (their incomes are low), or both. Covering them means finding the money to pay for the cost of their medical treatment. You can cover poor people by giving them money. And you can cover sick people by requiring insurers to sell plans to people regardless of age or preexisting conditions. Obamacare uses both of these methods. But Republicans oppose spending more money on the poor, and they oppose regulation, which means they don’t want to do either of them.
Conservatives do have ideas, of course. They would like to deregulate the insurance industry, letting insurers skim out healthier customers and charge higher prices to people who are sick. And they’d let insurers sell much skimpier plans that only cover catastrophic expenses, leaving customers to pay for their own treatments. As for funding, most conservatives do favor eliminating the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance, which is a source of funding. The problem is that eliminating that deduction would unravel the entire fabric of employer-based insurance, threatening the status quo for most working-age Americans and their families. Throwing nearly everybody who has private insurance onto barely regulated markets, with only a meager tax credit to fund a crappy, catastrophic plan, would be politically disastrous. So Republicans cannot and will not present anything like a detailed party-wide alternative to the status quo.
