On the eve of Obama’s State of the Union Speech, his signature achievement still remains grossly unpopular with the American people. The latest AP poll shows that 66% disapprove of the law – and there’s no reason to believe the numbers will get better this year, as millions more people are dropped from their plans.
There is no better time than right now for Republicans to present to the American people their vision for a conservative health care system to replace ObamaCare with.
Although there already are several alternative Republican plans out there, the plan a trio of Senate Republicans put forth today, is considered by health care expert Avik Roy to be “the most thoughtful and constructive plan yet developed to repeal and replace Obamacare.”
The proposal by Senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), Richard Burr (N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) is called the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act, and it seeks to ensure that as many Americans have health coverage as Obamacare does.
Avik Roy writes that while “it’s not perfect,” the Senators have come up with a “constructive, center-right approach.”
The bottom line is this. The Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan is a serious, constructive, and pragmatic one. Precisely for those reasons, it won’t satisfy the purest Obamacare haters for whom there is not a single provision in the law worth retaining, nor those who think the health care system was just fine as it was. And it won’t drastically shrink the scale and scope of federal spending on health care, at least in the near term.
What it will do is substantially deregulate the health insurance market, a process that is likely to make health insurance less costly over time. If health insurance is less costly, then federal spending on health insurance can shrink alongside. And it will do all of these things while approximating the number of Americans under Obamacare who have the security of health insurance coverage.