Republicans have spent the last three years warning Americans not be baited by President Obama’s now-broken promises about Obamacare – now the conservative caucus has found itself on the hook.
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“If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan, period,” the president said countless times before the laws implementation.
Now everyone from congressional Democrats to former President Bill Clinton is calling on Obama to make good on his promise, prompting bills in both the House and Senate to do so.
The legislation Republicans have been calling for just became a landmine on the right side of the aisle.
Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Senate bill aims to fulfill the president’s promise by forcing insurance companies to continue offering the already-existing plans consumers want to keep in spite of and alongside the Affordable Care Act.
If you like it, you really can keep it. But if the insurance company does not, it will take it – along with everyone else’s coverage in the state.
The caveat in Landrieu’s law mandates that if insurance companies fail to honor the pre-law pre-existing policies in a given state, they have to close up shop in said state entirely.
Having already decried the Affordable Care Act a gross regulatory overstep into the bounds of the free-market, an even larger degree of oversight and subsequent consequences for the insurance business is likely not the solution Republicans had in mind – but it might be the one they have cornered themselves into supporting.
The House of Representatives is poised to vote on a bill by Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton that carries the same message, but due to the provisions of the already-enacted Affordable Care Act, Upton’s proposal lacks any teeth compelling insurance companies to follow through.
That puts thousands of American mid-term election voters interested in keeping the healthcare they already have right behind Democrats one year from now – and across a chasm of private sector deregulatory philosophy increasingly solidified in the right-reaching Republican Party.
In the event that the Republican-controlled House passes the Republican bill, and the Democrat-controlled Senate does likewise with the Democrat’s bill, the two could go to conference with a real possibility of final passage.
With all the rhetoric coming from the right in response to the president’s broken promise, Republicans would be hard pressed to withdraw support from a proposal guaranteeing healthcare plans for likely millions of Americans.
Suffering major losses in public support polls after the government shutdown and facing tough re-election battles in enough districts to cost them the House majority, the cost of stepping back now could take away the only remaining legislative leverage Republicans still have.
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- With a nudge from Bill Clinton, Democrats seek to tweak health law (news.yahoo.com)
- Dems to White House: Fix Obamacare, and fast (washingtonpost.com)