Democrats muscled health care reform into law early last year, confident that Americans would come to love it once they understood it.
They’re coming to understand it. They still don’t like it.
Americans are divided, but polling has consistently shown that more people oppose the law than support it.
Now Republican leaders in the House are pushing a vote for repeal. No surprise there, since many successful GOP candidates in 2010 campaigned on a promise to do just that.
Republicans, have your vote. We didn’t like the law either.
As a practical matter, though, repeal isn’t likely. If repeal wins approval in the House and Senate — a shaky proposition in the Senate — President Barack Obama will issue a veto.
And as a political matter, an outright repeal isn’t really a winner. Most Americans dislike the law, but few are gunning to do away with it altogether. They don’t like its mandates and costs, but they’d prefer to see a scaled down law that still provides more access to health care.
Republicans run the risk of overreaching on this, as Democrats did in pushing a vast expansion of government into the health care field.
Republicans would be wise to focus on how to reduce the cost and scope of this enormously expensive entitlement.
The new law is already being undermined … by the Obama administration. It has granted scores of waivers to employers, insurers and unions, allowing them to maintain coverage below the law’s standards. So even while the administration defends the law, it is tacitly admitting that the law has vast problems.
The insurance mandate is the most unpopular provision in the law — and the one that’s on shakiest legal ground. Last month, a federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional to require that Americans buy insurance coverage or pay a penalty. If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, the entire law could collapse.
So it would be wise for Republicans to fashion an alternative … and for Democrats to be something more than obstructionists. Republican leaders say four House committees will start work soon to create new health care legislation.
What could emerge? In early 2010, Obama convened a summit of Republican and Democratic leaders to sift through the best ideas on the overhaul. Republicans proposed a lot of good ideas. Most of them wound up on the cutting room floor.
Some of the best:
*Give people buying private coverage the same tax breaks as those who get their insurance through an employer. That would help millions of people acquire coverage.
*Free insurers to sell policies across state lines. That would loosen strangling state-by-state regulations and spur competition to push premium prices down.
*Rein in the medical malpractice system that forces doctors to order unneeded and expensive tests to protect themselves from lawsuits.
*Provide more options for people to buy affordable coverage for catastrophic illnesses.
Republicans should push to tighten cost controls, including a much stronger effort to reshape Medicare’s antiquated fee-for-service system.
The new law doesn’t fully kick in until 2014. There’s plenty of time to fashion an agreement on something that Americans
can
love.
