What is the burr in the Republicans saddle? What propels them to keep trying to repeal and replace the ACA (Obamacare)? Republicans are hell-bent on enacting their own medical care insurance plan; however, in each iteration, their plan gets worse, not better.
The AHCA, the American Health Care Act, passed by the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives last spring would have been disastrous. Among other horrible things, its enactment would have caused over 20 million people to lose health insurance.
The Republicans in the Senate failed to pass their modified version of the plan. But instead of giving up, they came again–proposing something worse. They tried and failed to pass a bill that would have caused even more people not to have health insurance–32 million this time.
And they have come back again, this time it’s the Graham-Cassidy bill. While the Congressional Budget Office has not yet analyzed the bill to estimate how many people it would cause to lose insurance, we know it is worse than the previous bills. It would gut the ACA, abolishing the individual and employer mandates as well as the insurance exchanges. It would cut Medicaid by one-third. Unbelievably, it would take funding away from the states that expanded Medicaid (mostly Democratic states) and increase funds to states that did not expand Medicaid (mostly Republican states).
Over 80 percent of the American public oppose the repeal of the ACA. Yet, the Republicans keep forging ahead (or backward?). Why? Could it be that the Republicans are intent on eliminating an Obama legacy? Unlikely now. Obama is gone, and they are expending too much energy and capital to be chasing something so minor.
Could it be that Republicans are pursuing an ideological goal–pursuing a conservative position of being against social programs? Perhaps. But one wonders whether they would work this hard just to oppose social support programs?
Perhaps they are pursuing tax cuts for the rich. The ACA increased taxes a little on the wealthy. Abolishing the ACA would end those taxes.
If we follow the money a little closer, we may find the culprits. One article claims “The GOP can’t quit Obamacare (the ACA) repeal because of their donors.” The New York Times reported that a moderate senator, Dean Heller of Nevada, switched from being a critic of repeal efforts to being a strong supporter of the Graham-Cassidy bill after getting a scolding from Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, two billionaire Republican donors.
If one assumes the goal of all these so-called “repeal and replace” (ACA) efforts is primarily to please and keep donors, this bizarre activity becomes more plausible. Then the question is what do these wealthy donors want? I think it is primarily to cut their tax bills.
Yes, the wealthy are ideologically driven–they want to shrink the size of government. But why shrink the size of government? One answer: to lower their tax burden. The smaller the federal government, the smaller would be their taxes. If so, once again, it is all about the money.