The Hill reports the Senate GOP is trying to decide how much of ObamaCare to repeal via the budget-reconciliation process:
[Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell only needs 51 votes instead of the customary 60 because he is moving the repeal measure under a special budgetary process known as reconciliation. The downside of the strategy is that that package can only include provisions designed to impact the budget deficit.
As a result, popular parts of the law, such as the prohibition against discriminating against pre-existing conditions and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26, cannot be included.
First of all, Obamacare’s most enduring myth is that its pre-existing conditions provisions are popular. This myth is based entirely on misleading poll questions that ask about only the (presumed) benefits of those regulations. When pollsters ask about not only the benefits but also the costs of those regulations, 2-to-1 public support flips dramatically to 5-to-1 opposition. Second, that last part is a matter of debate, not fact.
As the Heritage Foundation’s Paul Winfree and I explain (in the Hill, as it happens):
A full-repeal bill…would recognize that ObamaCare creates a single, integrated program of taxes and subsidies that work in concert to expand coverage, and would eliminate that entire program as a whole. Its primary effect would be budgetary. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), full repeal would eliminate $1.7 trillion of spending and “would reduce deficits during the first half of the decade.” Retaining ObamaCare’s spending cuts would ensure that repeal reduces deficits in perpetuity.
With respect to the opinion, held mostly by Democrats, that the Hill portrays as fact, we write:
Opponents will try to argue that repealing ObamaCare’s health-insurance regulations (e.g., community rating) would have only an incidental effect on the budget. Yet those regulations are merely part of that larger, integrated program to expand coverage: community rating taxes the healthy to subsidize the sick; the individual mandate enforces those transfers by making part of that implicit tax explicit; additional regulations further enforce that implicit tax; explicit premium subsidies reduce those implicit taxes, and supplement the implicit subsidies, for low-income taxpayers; and the employer mandate imposes an implicit tax on workers that both reduces and offsets direct spending on premium subsidies.
Every relevant authority has held these provisions were designed to create a single, integrated program of taxes and transfers, and has rejected attempts to isolate those regulations from other parts of that program.
Winfree and I then cite former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), former House Speaker Nancy Polosi (D-CA), the Obama administration, and the Supreme Court, all of whom fell over themselves to argue that those regulations are part of a single, integrated program. As a result:
To treat ObamaCare’s health-insurance regulations as separate from that larger scheme is to renounce the Supreme Court’s King ruling and everything ObamaCare’s authors have said about how the law works. It would amount, to quote the Obama administration, to “seizing on isolated phrases [and] giving them a meaning divorced from statutory context [to] advance a radically different conception of the Act’s operation.”
Thus, “Congress may repeal those regulations via reconciliation just as it can repeal rules regulating any other government spending Congress zeroes-out through that process.”
This item first appeared on Cato at Liberty.
