And now, John Boehner says ObamaCare will stay the law of the land. I'm in complete agreement. There will be mild modifications, probably requested by the governors, but the Medicare expansion is here to stay, so are the exchanges, and so are the subsidies (guess who they go to? That's right, a lot of Trump voters!). Big Pharma and all the people who benefit will stand on the tracks to stop the repeal.
I imagine the Trump base will move on swiftly to other issues and the GOP will gain collective amnesia that they ever wanted to repeal the law. In five years, it will be remembered as the "Affordable Care Act," not "ObamaCare."
Obama's victory on his healthcare law is breathtaking. He rolled the dice and it looks like he's won the game after all. And it looks like ObamaCare will be the transition point between our prior system and single payer. (Or as they will call it, "Medicare for All.")
The RNC really fumbled badly on not using the 5 years to come up with a replacement plan.
I'm not seeing how Obamacare will be replaced by single-payer if Republicans end up repairing (instead of repealing) it. If it's running like a well-oiled machine by the time 2020 rolls around, there will be very little incentive to take the next step and institute single-payer. And -apart from some left-wing activists- why would we? Why change that which is no longer broken? Unless you are proposing it will be done by stealth, step-by-step, without anyone noticing.
I think ObamaCare - this has been stated somewhere, I don't recall - was always intended to be a middle transition point between our free market system and single payer. Or maybe I'm conflating the fact Obama was for single payer and has been on record favoring it since 1993. I also favor restricting coverage based on lifestyle choices (or hiking your premiums accordingly).
Anyway - let me lay out my thinking. Note I am among the group of conservatives that believe in breaking up the HMO's, and significant drug importation / patent reform to hold down prices in combination with ObamaCare alongside shrinking the Medicare expansion / curtailing it.
ObamaCare will never solve all the bugs in the system. Republicans can't repeal the law because it's a significant update over the old issues (using mostly conservative orthodoxy, I might add). But a lot of people would conclude that the law doesn't go far enough to hold down prices, which is the main flaw of ObamaCare, not coverage. The public option was designed to create competition but the votes weren't simply there to create that system (especially since we had just bailed out Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, which are similarly constructed to how a public option corporation might operate).
But ObamaCare's major flaw remains that prices are still climbing upwards. They're slowing and the healthcare cost curve has slowed down considerably given the reforms
but they're not slowing down enough. Ergo, we need a long term solution that limits costs that have risen drastically since the 1980s.
The Right doesn't have a solution, because let's face it, any conservative solution would need to break up Big Pharma, impose unpopular restrictions on healthcare coverage (for example, we'd have to start penalizing the obese). This will never fly among the populist Right, so how do you control costs?
If you're not willing to take on the big drug companies and the HMO's, and restrict healthcare coverage based on lifestyle choices ... you make the government the arbiter of costs and force doctors, hospitals and other providers to provide the good at the rates the government dictates. Yes, this is very close to socialism, but it has worked fairly well in Germany, the UK, and elsewhere. I don't like the system for various reasons, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Eventually the American left will ram through a single payer system that is probably modeled on an already successful model: Medicare.
