After trying and failing to repeal President Obama’s marquee healthcare law, in 2013 Republicans finally found the Achilles’ heel of Obamacare: The government’s financial guarantees to health insurance companies. Three years later and with a shot at full repeal, the GOP is trying to stitch together the damage they caused.
In an ironic twist, the GOP is weighing different options to keep health insurers in the Obamacare system while they dismantle the law.
When the next Congress convenes, Republicans will repeal Obamacare. But they plan on doing it slowly to give themselves time to draft a replacement. Insurance companies are expected to jump ship during that period, leaving millions without health coverage. Republicans are scrambling to keep that from happening.
“Recognizing the problem,” the Hill reports, “Republican congressional staffers are in talks with insurers about policies they could implement to help improve their financial situation in that interim period and prevent a breakdown in the market, according to three Republican lobbyists.”
And that’s an interesting twist for Republicans especially ones named Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, and the Trump’s future Attorney General, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
Working both cooperatively and separately at times, the troupe slipped a policy rider into the 2014 omnibus bill that would wipe out the so called risk corridors. And it worked.
Without the corridors, the federal government was prohibited from bailing out insurance companies who chose to participate in Obamacare’s exchange. It’s one of the primary reasons the system is going belly up.
Now that Republicans are running the show in Washington, they’re not so gung-ho on full repeal. On Wednesday Sen. David Perdue insisted that his party wouldn’t do away with the behemoth all at once.
“It’s a partial repeal first of all, it’s not a total repeal,” Perdue said. “Let’s get that out of the way. It’s a partial repeal, and I think there are pieces of it in there that have to stay in place for a while and that is what we are going to be working on.”
Details aren’t clear about what a deal with insureres would include. Keeping companies around for partial repeal during an uncertain health market will be incredibly expensive both financially and politically.
Consider the following. Democrats built the precarious Obamacare shack. Republicans did their best to tear apart the structure from the inside. And now on the eve of repeal, the GOP is trying to convince health insurance companies to stay inside while they torch the institution.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
