Back in the day, conservative health care maven Avik Roy put the wood to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement legislation, remarking after Paulie “improved” the bill to meet Republican criticism, “it’s curious that extending tax cuts was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans.”
Yeah, but that was then. Republicans have a whole new act, a whole new health care act, the Mitch McConnell act, and Avik’s lovin’ it! “The Senate’s health-care bill could be one of the GOP’s greatest accomplishments”.
Uh-huh. Well, New York’s Jonathan Chait is not so enamored: “The Defenses of the Senate Health-Care Plan Are Pathetically Dishonest”. After calling Avik out in the body of his text, Jon did a little leg work, or rather email work, inquiring of Mr. Roy if perhaps he had done a little “consulting” for the McConnell gang and received the following reply: “As a matter of policy, I don’t discuss with the press my conversations with policymakers.”
Uh-huh encore une fois.1 Back in the day, George F. Will got some criticism for both coaching Ronald Reagan for a presidential debate and then writing a column claiming that Ronnie came through like a champ. But that was then.
Afterwords
Over at Reason, Peter Suderman, relying on the Congressional Budget Office’s take on the Senate bill, is less enthused with Mitch’s, and Avik’s, handiwork:
“As with the structure of the Senate health care bill—a dysfunctional rewrite masquerading as repeal—what CBO’s report exposes is the GOP’s unwillingness to think beyond the parameters of Obamacare.
“Republicans did not respond to the failures of Obamacare with a different vision of how the health care system should be organized. They did not build a case for policies with different goals about the health care system. Instead, they criticized Obamacare for not living up to its own goals, for failing on its own terms. Even in their criticisms, they bought into to its premises. They had no policy goals of their own to promote.
“So it is hardly surprising that when it came time to repeal and replace Obamacare, they instead produced legislation that simply rewrote it, offering the same thing, but less of it. And it is even less surprising that the legislation they have released undercuts the criticisms that McConnell and others have made of Obamacare, because their plan has the same problems—but even more acute.”
I would only add to Pete’s words that the Senate bill is “offering the same thing, but less of it” not for any policy reasons, but only to provide tax cuts for milionaires/billionaires, which is “curious” if you think Republicans care about anyone but the rich, but otherwise not. In fact, the whole point of the Tea Party and their new maximum leader is to stop the government from wasting “their” money on poor folks, while the whole point of the “old” Republican Party is to cut taxes for the rich, but perhaps Avik would rather pretend he doesn’t know that. Otherwise, how could his new think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, get the big bucks?
Afterwords II
There’s also the theory described by Jonathan Chait, that McConnell isn’t interested in health care reform, possibly because he doesn’t believe that the Republican Party can agree on a meaningful replacement for Obamacare and thus can’t replace it—and perhaps, in their deep and twisted heart of hearts, don’t even want to replace it. So it’s “smarter” to propose a bill that can’t pass, let it fail, and then go on to something “important”, like tax “reform"—you know, real tax reform—we’re talkin’ trillions, not billions. So is that why Mitch talked with Avik, because he wanted crap?
- French for “once more”. ↩︎
