Here we go again
by David Atkins
They can't help themselves:
House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare's individual mandate.
It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.
"This is not credible, what they've done," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
The legislation would delay the penalty for noncompliance with the individual mandate until 2019. It suffered a blow on Wednesday when the Congressional Budget Office found that it would raise premiums and cause 13 million fewer people to be insured come 2018. It would save the federal government $170 billion and use the money to cover the $138 billion cost of replacing the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, which calculates Medicare payments to physicians and will automatically impose a 24 percent pay on April 1 unless Congress acts.
The individual mandate is a sweet target for Republicans in an election year because it's both unpopular and critical to the success of Obamacare. GOP leaders weren't fazed by the CBO score and fast-tracked the bill to a Friday vote.
Insurance industry wrote a letter this week calling on Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to leave the individual mandate alone, warning of higher premiums if it's unraveled. Even the top physicians group, the American Medical Association, which has made SGR repeal a priority, voiced disappointment with the partisan direction the issue has taken.
Yes, this is a cynical and sociopathic play by the GOP. But it's also worth noting that not even the pleas of the health insurance industry executives are swaying Republicans, nor have they for some time now. Republicans are acting not out of big business interest corruption, but simply because they think people having cheaper healthcare is a moral outrage that saps their initiative to work harder. Really.
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