Obamacare’s tenth life
Back in January, I recounted the Affordable Care Act’s many trials and tribulations in anticipation of what was poised to be its toughest battle yet. From Scott Brown cracking the Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate majority in 2010, to John Roberts turning gun-shy before obliterating the individual mandate, through Ted Cruz’s government shutdown, Obamacare had more than its share of close calls.
Yet the law defied death again and again. “[F]or eight years, center-left health reform has prevailed against constant slings and arrows because its moral foundations are strong,” I wrote at the time. “Obamacare’s tendency to survive may just be what spares it again.”
And survive again it has. Trumpcare is dead, and Obamacare is alive. The GOP’s seven-plus year charge of repeal and replace went down in flames on Friday, having barely even made it out of the starting gate. And when it comes to the core of Obamacare, Republicans hardly even put up a fight.
That’s because the GOP long ago gave up on contesting the basic moral foundation of Obamacare: the notion that everyone is entitled to healthcare as a right. It was a quiet concession, drowned out by years of chest-thumping cries to repeal Obamacare, but the right implicitly acquiesced to Obamacare’s new normal years ago. That, more than anything, doomed the effort to repeal it.
Republicans tried to resist the moral force of universal healthcare by tarring it as “socialized medicine” and a government takeover of health insurance. But since Obamacare began delivering real benefits to real people, the center of gravity within Republican opposition shifted toward a more practical, less ideological critique about high premiums and inadequate coverage. Underneath the howls for repeal, the conservative objection increasingly moved from universal healthcare itself to the outcomes and mechanisms Obamacare employed to approximate it.
Donald Trump formalized this concession. Just days after his election, he announced that he intended to keep Obamacare’s popular guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Even earlier, Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” proposal agreed to preserve this protection, too. But to insure the sick, you must also insure the healthy — insurance markets cannot function any other way. And when it comes to universal healthcare, insuring both the sick and healthy is more or less the whole ballgame.
To keep protections for the sick in place, the Republicans would have to produce a plan that looked a lot like Obamacare. Under this constraint, the only way to differentiate it — and thus the only way to realistically claim to “repeal” Obamacare — would be to design a version of the law that was meaner, stinger, and outright worse.
That’s ultimately just what the GOP did, but only after abandoning their first strategy: so-called “repeal and delay.” This plan — to give Republicans the political catharsis of an immediate Obamacare repeal vote, but delaying the effective date of repeal for several years — implicitly conceded two important points: First, that it was unjust and untenable to simply repeal and toss people off of their healthcare. And second, that Republicans had no idea how to actually replace the law.
After it became clear that repeal and delay too would cause chaos on insurance markets, that half-baked plan was scrapped once enough leading Republicans (Trump included) clamored for simultaneous repeal and replace. And that course correction produced the monstrosity that was the American Health Care Act.
The bill was a horribly constructed, unloved mess from the day Ryan announced it from behind his smirk. But it was really its Congressional Budget Office score that did it in, for the CBO confirmed what everyone suspected: that AHCA grossly offended the prevailing moral principle of universal healthcare. In pursuit of that principle, Obamacare had normalized a baseline of widespread and affordable coverage. AHCA did immense violence to each of these, threatening to throw 24 million people off their insurance and jack up rates on millions more of the oldest and more vulnerable Americans.
With that, it was only a matter of time before AHCA collapsed in a heap. There were other factors, of course: The Republican Party was in a defensive crouch from the get go, and couldn’t coalesce around a replacement plan. A public enraged by the elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency and terrified of the threat to life and limb posed by repeal galvanized to mount a fierce resistance. But the common thread through all of them was the potent moral force of universal healthcare.
Granted, Obamacare hasn’t yet achieved the goal of universal coverage. But it made a major down payment toward that goal, lowering uninsured rates to historic lows. With the failure of AHCA, the country is refusing to turn back from those gains.
So for the second consecutive Republican presidency, grand conservative designs to gut a pillar of the welfare state have crumbled. When George W. Bush decided to spend his second-term political capital privatizing Social Security, his plan made it through the summer before being pronounced dead. What is remarkable about Obamacare repeal is that it fell apart so fast.
But like Social Security reform, AHCA crumbled under the weight of poor policy design, Republican factionalism, and public resistance. Call it loss aversion, status quo bias, third-rail entitlements — the welfare state has demonstrated an impressive staying power.
And it all comes back to the foundational moral basis for government forging ahead to better people’s lives and provide a sense of security. That’s the brick wall that Ryan’s now-aborted “rescue mission” ran into headlong. Universal healthcare is right and just, and that’s why Obamacare has survived yet again — and perhaps for good.
