why the GOP hates Obamacare

The grounds for the Republican Party’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act are far from a single coherent argument. It is all the more confusing because one of the health care reform’s key provisions, the individual insurance mandate, has conservative origins. The requirement that individuals be required to purchase health insurance first emerged in Republican health care reform bills introduced in 1993 as alternatives to the Clinton administration’s plan.

That mandate was also a prominent feature of the Massachusetts plan passed under Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006. According to Romney, “we got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation,” Forbes reports. Furthermore, as Bill Keller argued in an op-ed for The New York Times, the GOP should be “the people who ought to be most vigorously applauding this success story” because the reform of the United States’s “overpriced, underperforming health care system” was done almost entirely with market incentives instead of government decree.

The fact that the idea of the individual mandate developed out of GOP rhetoric proves that the party is not opposed to the thought of making insurance affordable to millions of Americans. “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own protection,” Stuart Butler, a health care expert for the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, wrote in a 1989 brief titled Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans. “Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness.”

So the argument goes that just as legally mandated insurance makes economic sense for automobiles, it makes sense for health care, as well.

Several theories as to why Republicans want to see Obamacare defunded and repealed have been tossed around.

Republicans have said that the health care reform will destroy the economy. “Well, if you don’t believe Obamacare is the biggest job killer in the country, look to the facts,” Republican Rep. Ted Cruz of Texas said during his 21-hour speech on the Senate floor earlier this month. “This year, report after report has rolled in about employers restricting work hours to less than 30 hours per week — the point where the mandate kicks in. The data also points to record-low workweeks in low-wage industries.”

But for most companies, the employer mandate is not a huge burden. The companies that do not provide insurance and will be required to probably employ around 1 percent of American workers.

The theory put forward by Keller in his op-ed and by Eduardo Porter in his New York Times piece entitled “Why the Health Care Law Scares the G.O.P.” is that Republicans are worried that Americans will like the benefits of the reform too much. “You have probably figured out that the real mission of the Republican extortionists and their big-money backers was to scuttle the law before most Americans recognized it as a godsend and rendered it politically untouchable,” Keller wrote.

That argument makes sense to some degree. Speaking to radio host Rush Limbaugh in late August, Cruz said that President Obama “wants to get as many Americans as possible addicted to the subsidies, addicted to the sugar, because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound.”

But in Keller’s opinion, it is too late. Health care reform has already accomplished its first goal of enrolling millions of uninsured Americans, “many of whom have been living one medical emergency away from the poorhouse,” he wrote in the op-ed. The fact that the computer glitches that plagued the first week the exchanges were open for enrollment was evidence of demand for affordable coverage. This demand “is the 90 percent of the story that doesn’t make the headlines,” Sam Glick of the Oliver Wyman consulting firm told Keller.

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government shutdown

[10/16/13] Senate leaders announced on Wednesday that they have reached a deal to end the government shutdown and avoid a possible U.S. default.

According to sources, the Senate deal under discussion would reopen the government, funding it until January 15. It would also raise the debt limit until February 7 to avert a possible default on U.S. debt obligations for the first time.

It also would set up budget negotiations between the House and Senate for a long-term spending plan, and would include a provision to strengthen verification measures for people seeking government subsidies under Obama's signature health care reforms.

If the Senate passes an agreement, House Speaker John Boehner will probably face the decision of whether to allow a vote that he knows can only pass with virtually all Democrats and only a few of his fellow Republicans supporting it.

That would break a Republican tradition known as the Hastert rule. The informal tenet, named after former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, says that the House speaker does not introduce legislation unless a majority of Republicans say they will vote for it first.

On Tuesday, Obama called for House Republicans to "do what's right" by reopening government and ensuring the United States can pay its bills. "We don't have a lot of time," he said.

But he acknowledged Boehner's difficulty in getting his fellow House Republicans on the same page.

"Negotiating with me isn't necessarily good for the extreme faction in his caucus," Obama said, referring to the tea party and its conservative allies. "It weakens him, so there have been repeated situations where we have agreements. Then he goes back, and it turns out that he can't control his caucus."

***

Parts of the federal government officially shut down at 12:01 Tuesday morning after Congress played hot potato with a spending bill for several hours but failed to come to an agreement to fully fund normal operations.

By midday Monday, the congressional debate had fallen into a predictable pattern and a shutdown seemed inevitable. The House would pass a version of the spending bill that delayed or chipped away at the Affordable Care Act. The Senate would proceed to strip the bill of its amendments, pass it, and send it back to the House, and the cycle would start again.

Late Monday night, in a last ditch effort to end the ping-ponging between the House and Senate, House Republicans offered to setup a bipartisan conference committee to negotiate the differences between the House and Senate bills.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., rejected that proposal outright, repeating his mantra that the Senate isn't interested in passing anything but a "clean" spending bill and that they won't be forced to negotiate "with a gun to our head."  Senate Democrats also pointed out that they had been calling for a bipartisan conference for months, a request that had been brushed off by House Republicans.

Earlier Monday, President Obama placed calls to Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Monday afternoon, but did not seem to be looking for a negotiating partner. He reiterated his preference for a "clean" spending bill free of any amendments and said he would continue to oppose any attempts to defund or delay the healthcare law, a White House official said.

In the morning, an estimated 800,000 of the 2.1 million federal workers who are deemed nonessential for the operations of the government will be sent home after they have shut down their work. Only employees who are necessary to ensure national security and protect Americans' lives and property will be allowed to work, albeit without pay, along with a few other types of workers.