As Republicans prepare to celebrate their tax reform victory, a potential disaster lurks right around the corner.
Mitch McConnell said Monday that on his to-do list this week is passage of bills to prop up Obamacare. In a December 1 colloquy with Senator Susan Collins of Maine, whose vote on tax reform McConnell was desperate to get, the Senate majority leader expressed support for passing additional legislation funding Obamacare by the end of the year.
The politics and policy of an Obamacare bailout bill absent real reform is bad enough by itself. “I personally will not be part of any bailout of insurance companies without reform,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, vowed on the Senate floor on July 18. The tax bill’s repeal of the individual mandate was a good thing but by itself does not constitute real reform.
What’s much worse than spending billions more on Obamacare is the possibility that an Obamacare bailout could create new funding streams to fund elective abortion. The bills that Collins wants do not currently include the Hyde amendment, which prohibits such funding.
We hope Republicans would not be so foolish and unprincipled as to affirmatively send tax dollars to fund insurance plans that cover elective abortions. The issue could be easily addressed by adding Hyde amendment language, or by putting any new health-care funding in laws to which the Hyde amendment is permanently attached. (If Democrats want to kill what are mostly unnecessary additional subsidies out of deference to the abortion lobby, that’s on them.)
But the issue remains unresolved. “We have been working on those concerns,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Monday. “Nothing new to announce just yet, but he’s been working on that.”
Republicans can’t say they weren’t warned about the matter. As THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported back in July:
The passage of Obamacare in 2010 marked a huge expansion of taxpayer funding of abortion. The “compromise” among Democrats was to allow taxpayer-funding of insurance plans that cover elective abortion unless a state passed a law banning Obamacare funding of abortion coverage (as half of the country would go on to do). That compromise was wildly unpopular: It nearly sunk Obamacare in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and played a significant role in the Democrats’ loss of the House in November 2010.
Obamacare funding is mandatory spending, which means that it will go out the door even during a government shutdown. Cutting off Obamacare’s subsidies for elective abortion would require a new law passed by Congress and signed by the president. The most realistic bill to do that was killed in September by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, John McCain of Arizona, and Susan Collins of Maine.
But simply because Republicans have failed to end the abortion-funding scheme created by Obamacare in 2010, there’s no reason they should give their blessing to taxpayer funding of abortion in 2017. If Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan puts such a measure in a bill to fund the government, every pro-life legislator would be obligated to vote against it. Any possible government shutdown would not be the fault of pro-life legislators. It would be the fault of the Republicans leaders who put such a bill up for a vote.
It should be noted that it’s not even clear why a congressional Obamacare bailout is necessary. Some have argued that the bipartisan bailout bill known as Alexander-Murray is needed because the Trump administration cut off some subsidies to insurers who must reduce the cost of health expenses for low-income Obamacare enrollees. But as THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Chris Deaton explained on October 18, “when the Trump administration announced it would discontinue making the payments to insurers, the president was not ending the relief insurers provide to the people they cover.”
Insurers are still obligated by law to lower the health expenses of individuals earning 100 percent to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, and they have made up for the loss of the Trump administration’s payments by raising premiums. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported on October 27, “Eighty-four percent of marketplace enrollees receive premium subsidies through tax credits, and those tax credits will increase dollar for dollar along with benchmark silver premiums. These enrollees should not be affected financially by the premium surcharges. Lower-income consumers eligible for cost-sharing reductions will likely want to continue to enroll in silver plans to qualify for those reductions.”
The Kaiser Foundation noted that those on Obamacare earning between 250 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line “could in some instances be better off. They will receive bigger premium subsidies, and could use those to pay less than they would now for a bronze plan (with higher patient cost-sharing) or a gold plan (with lower patient cost-sharing).”Those who don’t qualify for Obamacare subsidies—Americans earning more than 400 percent of the poverty level—could be better or worse off depending on how states and insurers responded to the Trump administration move. “[C]onsumers will generally be protected,” the Kaiser Foundation concluded. Republicans shouldn’t betray their core principles and their core supporters even if the need to prop up Obamacare were greater, but they face a much easier choice than that today.
