The reality is simple: the GOP Senate and House will not soon be unifying around a singular plan to repeal Obamacare.
And if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiff in the King v. Burwell case to eliminate subsidies received by the 8 million enrolled in health care plans purchased under the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchanges, GOP candidates who’ve crusaded against Obamacare will be scrambling to explain how they’ll prevent real voters from losing real benefits.
If not handled intelligently, this issue has the potential to eviscerate vulnerable GOP candidates. Real people losing real benefits? A PR debacle in the making.
The GOP has just three options if the Court sides with King: They can do nothing, they can try to coalesce behind a “repeal and replace” bill, or they can put forward a response targeted to the King ruling.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has the most sensible and workable legislation. It would extend some to-be-determined form of financial assistance until a new president is in office. If it’s a Republican, he or she would likely sign the Obamacare-repeal bill that President Obama would not.
But Johnson’s bill, which would extend the eliminated subsidies until August 2017 while, creditably, also repealing Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, hasn’t been welcomed with open arms by a variety of conservatives for one reason: it keeps Obamacare alive achat quebec viagra.
Maybe so, but it provides the basis for removing a major dagger in the arsenal of issues that have the potency to define a GOP incumbent as an uncaring, impractical ideologue who puts party politics before his own constituents, and has no solution to solving the problem he helped create.
Time to be smart.