Barack Obama

Why A President Romney Would Find It Hard To Repeal 'Obamacare'

Brian Beutler | January 18, 2012, 5:27AM

Mitt Romney

Should he win the nomination and the presidency, then on inauguration day in 2013, after all the pageantry has subsided, Mitt Romney will face a key test: does he take aggressive action to roll back Obamacare as he and every other GOP contender has promised? Or will he accede to pragmatic realities and seek detente with Democrats on the issue that has most divided the parties over the past three years?

The amount of money, strategizing, myth-making, and political capital that Republicans have already thrown at the health care law will make it very difficult for Romney or any GOP President not to enter office with guns blazing. But many of the would-be policy makers who have made dismantling the law their top priority haven't given any real thought to how, mechanically, to unwind it. A closer look reveals that chipping away at Obamacare, or even repealing it altogether will be a daunting challenge, and even if successful will leave the Republican party holding the bag politically for the policy muddle they will create in the process.

"It would be a mess," said Donald Berwick, who led the law's implementation last year as Obama's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services director. "If I was given the assignment of unwinding the law, I wouldn't know how to do that. I would thoroughly disagree with it but it would be technically very difficult."

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Affordable Care Act

How To Easily End The 'Doc Fix' Problem -- And Why House GOP Is Opposed

Sahil Kapur | January 16, 2012, 5:32AM

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) And House GOP Doctors Caucus

One of the items Congress extended for two months in the December payroll tax package is current Medicare payment rates to physicians, averting a steep 27.4 percent cut. Although a yearlong "doc fix" is seen as likeliest when lawmakers return to town this week and begin negotiating pay-fors, even that would merely be punting an issue in need of a permanent fix.

Over the last few months there's been serious talk in Congress of buying out the "doc fix" issue once and for all with war savings from troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan, estimated at over half a trillion dollars.

The idea has been championed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and multiple other key senators including John Kerry (D-MA), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Tom Harkin (D-IA).

But even though this plan could remove for free the $300-billion-and-growing albatross from the nation's neck, it faces fierce resistance from House Republicans. In fact, some of the vocal opponents are doctors in the caucus, whom Leadership tends to give the first bite at the apple on health issues.

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Obamacare

Why The 2012 Election May Be The GOP's Only Chance To Repeal Health Care Reform

Sahil Kapur | January 10, 2012, 5:23AM

President Barack Obama speaks on the economy in Shaker Heights, OH on January 4, 2012.

Before she dropped out of the GOP presidential race, Michele Bachmann waxed apocalyptic about how 2012 is the Republican Party's only chance to repeal the health reform law. "We cannot afford to have a candidate who fails to understand the complexity of Obamacare or the urgency of its repeal," the Minnesota congresswoman said in an often-repeated line. "Because, we have only have one chance for repeal, and that's 2012."

There's truth to this statement: if Republicans fail to capture the presidency this time around, repealing some or all of the law becomes far more difficult later, even if the GOP sweeps Congress in 2012 and wins the White House in 2016 with equal determination to squash it.

"The 2012 election will be the most important in the history of our health care system because it will determine whether the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is implemented or repealed," wrote Harvard health policy expert David Blumenthal in the New England Journal of Medicine. "The consequences for Americans and their health care will be huge."

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Rick Santorum

Hmmm... Santorum's Healthcare Pitch Sounds An Awful Lot Like Obamacare For The Elderly

Brian Beutler | January 9, 2012, 2:11PM

Ever since Republicans in Congress voted overwhelmingly for Paul Ryan's budget, the GOP has expected its leading Presidential candidates to back a similar Medicare privatization scheme. Most of them have followed suit. Rick Santorum is trying to have it both ways.

During Sunday morning's NBC debate, the come-from-behind winner of the Iowa caucuses talked about his Medicare pitch to voters.

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