Friday, February 4, 2011

Partisan strategies for repealing replacing "Obamacare"

Now that the House and Senate members have their votes registered for or against repeal of “obamacare”, and campaign promises have been fulfilled,  not much will happen until the Supreme Court rules. In the meantime, both parties are strategizing with an eye toward the 2012 and both are gambling. Democrats have reason to have hope. The fat lady has not yet sung.
 Funny how Republican appointed judges have ruled against its constitutionality while Democratic appointed judges have voted in favor. Strategically speaking, if you want to have a case settled by a lower court judge and you have an issue that could have venue in many courts, you shop around and  take it to the court and its  judge you think will rule in your favor.  That is why we have the Supreme Court, to be the buck that stops shopping. One swing justice also in the Supreme Court could determine the outcome in an ideologically closely divided bench. Such will be the situation in the Court’s  decision on health care reform.
In the meantime, the Republican dominated House . has buried the debate in four committees. knowing that they could never put enough garbage in to the Congressional Budget Office to make the figures come out to  show that their substitute proposals would do what :”obamacare” does:  reduce health care costs, generate the financial conditions  to protect consumers with  pre-existing conditions or make health care affordable  to more than 27 million cut out of the system now or extend the life of Medicare.  Instead, Republicans  are banking on a  Supreme Court decision declaring mandates unconstitutional or, less likely, finding health insurance is not interstate commerce so the federal government has no jurisdiction.
In the meantime, Republicans have launched a campaign to discredit any prior Congressional Budget Office analyses that could be cited as proof…off handedly dismissing  it  as “garbage in, garbage out”.  We should demand from Republicans to show us what they call “garbage in”.  (Much about the requests to the CBO  can be found on the Muftic Forum website…www.mufticforum.com.  Read the Committee chairs request, and you will find not much in their requests conditioned upon certain mathematical input. I supposed Republicans want us to rely on conservative CATO institute type think tanks or those such as the Lewin Group which is closely tied to the health insurance industry.)
In January listening to Sunday morning network talk, I heard  Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo) hint that the trick to getting around a negative Supreme court decision was to find another way to get enough paying customers in the insurance pool to spread the risk around so that those with pre-existing conditions could get covered and all health care costs would be reduced.
 The mandate issue centers on that one point: can we force those who want to freeload to buy insurance or is there a way to provide incentives.  I suspect that in the Democrat’s hip pocket may be such a plan B, less satisfactory than a mandate, but effective enough to provide the needed participation in the insurance pool to make it economically feasible.  

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