Republicans in the House of Representatives are seeking to force a vote, using a discharge petition, on repealing Obamacare. This has caused some infighting since some Republicans want to simply repeal the monstrosity that passed earlier this year, while other GOPers are in the repeal-and-replace camp (Heritage Action is leading the pure repeal effort and National Review has good coverage here and here).
I’m not an expert on the politics of healthcare and discharge petitions, but my gut instinct is that a pure repeal vote is the best short-term strategy. Having said that, there should be no question that good policy requires much more than repeal. In this new Center for Freedom and Prosperity video, Eline van den Broek of the European Independent Institute explains that Obamacare should be repealed, but she also makes a key observation that the American healthcare system was in deep trouble even before that legislation was adopted and sweeping reforms are needed for Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax code’s healthcare exclusion.
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I especially like the “Health Freedom Meter” in the video. Citing government data on the huge share of healthcare spending that already is being financed by taxpayers – and showing that only 12 percent is financed directly by consumers, the Health Freedom Meter shows that Obamacare moved America from having a healthcare system 67 percent controlled by government to a system 79 percent controlled by government. That’s obviously a step in the wrong direction, but it also makes clear that repealing Obamacare means a system that will still be burdened with far too much government invovlement and intervention.
Unfortunately, it is not clear if Republicans have the brains or the ….um…fortitude to push the sweeping reforms advocated in the video. Congressman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)’s Roadmap is one of the few GOP proposals that contains some of the policies mentioned in the video (though that proposal is marred on the revenue side by the inclusion of a value-added tax).
The ultimate lesson to be learned from this issue is that more government is not the way to solve problems caused by government. Every time politicians intervene in the healthcare market, they pass some law that makes the system worse. They then say that the resulting problems require even more government intervention. I expect that I’ll be famous at some point (like Art Laffer for the Laffer Curve) for Mitchell’s Law, which is the simple observation that “Bad government policy begets more bad government policy.” But I’d much prefer to remain anonymous because politicians stopped being such nuisances.
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