The GOP’s effort to dismantle health reform

What happened

The House of Representatives this week voted to repeal the sweeping health-care reform signed into law by President Barack Obama last year, the first in a planned series of Republican efforts to undermine the legislation. The GOP’s repeal bill was primarily symbolic, because it will almost certainly die in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Republicans claimed the health-care-reform law would burden businesses, destroy jobs, and increase the federal deficit. “This new law is a fiscal house of cards,” said GOP Rep. Paul Ryan.

Democrats responded by launching a new campaign to sell their reform plan to skeptical Americans. Their congressional leaders and President Obama warned that repeal would threaten more than 50 million Americans with pre-existing health conditions and leave 50 million people uninsured. “We can’t go backward,” Obama said. “Americans deserve the freedom and security of knowing that insurance companies can’t deny, cap, or drop their coverage when they need it the most.”

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What the editorials said

The cartoonish title of the GOP repeal bill—“Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act”—tells you all you need to know, said the Las Vegas Sun. It not only confirms Republicans’ “immaturity,” it’s also “a flat-out lie.” The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the reform law provides cost savings that will actually reduce the deficit by $230 billion over 10 years. And with 32 million uninsured Americans gaining insurance coverage under reform, tens of thousands of new health-care jobs will be created.

Repealing Obamacare is what Republicans who won in Novem­ber “were sent to Washington to do,” said the New York Post. The CBO estimate of its cost savings is “a fiction,’’ created because Democrats “ordered it to make a host of absurd assumptions.’’ The law will greatly increase health-care costs and premiums, impose new taxes on employers and citizens, and impose an unconstitutional mandate that everyone buy health insurance. To keep all that from happening, said National Review, Republicans should remove “Obamacare’s sources of funding,” such as taxes on medical devices and tanning salons. Rather than allow the public to grow “resigned” to Obama’s boondoggle, we must “keep hope [of repeal] alive.”

What the columnists said

What happened to all the Republicans’ violent rhetoric? said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. It took the attempted assassination of a Democratic colleague to shame them, but Republicans this week finally proved capable of “self-restraint.” Talk of “tyranny,” “baby killers,” and “death panels” was gone; House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor even stopped using the phrase “job-killing” to attack the reform plan, substituting “job-destroying.”

If only Democrats had exercised some restraint when constructing their fiscal “time bomb,” said Timothy Carney in the Washington Examiner. We need only look to Mitt Romney’s health-care reform in Massachusetts—the inspiration for Obamacare—to see what lies ahead. In Massachusetts, a similar reliance on “subsidies, mandates, and regulations quickly caused health-insurance and health-care costs to spike,” requiring “cost controls on insurers and providers while raising taxes on the state’s residents and businesses.” I wouldn’t want to be a “red-state Democrat up for re-election in 2012,” said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com. In coming months, they’ll be forced to vote “again and again” on legislation highlighting reform’s most unpopular elements—from the individual mandate to cuts to the Medicare Advantage program.

Actually, it’s Republicans who should worry, said Kirsten Powers in TheDailyBeast.com. The public’s feverish fear of the new law has broken: A new Washington Post–ABC News poll shows just 37 percent of Americans favor repealing all or parts of the law, with just 18 percent favoring total repeal. Just wait until voters realize the GOP is “trying to take away protections from lifetime and annual caps, denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and being dropped from your health insurance” if you get sick. Congress is not debating two “visions” of fixing health care, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. Obama’s reform plan offers expanded coverage, cost-control experiments, and a more competitive insurance market. What do Republicans offer, other than the dysfunctional and inhumane “status quo”?