The Congressional session started today. Today is Day 1 of the Repeal and Replace watch. It could be a two year gig, a five year gig or a seventy three year gig. We don’t know yet. But we are seeing some of the mechanical parts initiated.
First from Morning Consult:
Obamacare repeal reconciliation language is out, and it's vague. Must save >$1B over 10 years. https://t.co/IiDy7XfCBl via @MelMcIntire
— Margot Sanger-Katz (@sangerkatz) January 3, 2017
$1 billion dollars is a placeholder. That could be achieved by slightly tweaking any one of seventy three sections of the ACA. It is a nothingburger and a placeholder. It is also a hint that a rebranding and calling it victory is mechanically possible. If the reconciliation bill was filed with an instruction to save $1 Trillion dollars than that would be an indicator that a complete gutting would be one of the few plausible solutions to that specification. $1 billion dollars is going to be a massive undercount unless there are a bunch of additional tax cuts rolled into the rollback of coverage expansion subsidies but it is a marker that a rebranding is plausible.
Secondly, my initial one week reaction was wrong
I expect the filibuster to be gone by lunchtime on the first day of the new Congress.
I thought party whose agenda is unpopular and representing a minority of the voters would have removed a major procedural limit to their ability to implement and entrench significant portions of their stated agenda I was wrong. However the political incentives of at least half a handful of Republicans to either extract concessions or create plenty of situations where they can vote yes while hoping for a no upon which they can blame those obstructionist Democrats for not enabling a Heritage Foundation utopia to pass has saved the filibuster.
This, I think is the far more interesting thing today. Congressional Republicans and Trump can use reconciliation to roll back the taxes that fund the ACA immediately while sunsetting the ACA’s subsidies for an indeterminate number of years into the future without a single Democratic vote. They can’t roll back the insurance regulations without at least eight Democratic senators. I don’t trust the first few Democratic Senators to not sell out to gut the ACA in an attempt to protect their seat but I don’t think the 6th, 7th or 8th Democrat has a political incentive to gut the ACA. Without an agreement on the insurance regulations (and the cost sharing reduction subsidies), the individual insurance market will explode.
If the Democrats can hold firm where their agreement zone for at least eight votes in the Senate and a few dozen in the House is tweaks on the ACA that have been proposed in the past by Democrats such as the copper plan for a lower actuarial value plan, elimination of the employer mandate and technocratic tweaks that wonks have wanted, that is a plausible get. And if that is not what is being offered, the Republicans will have the choice of either blowing up the individual market or extending the sunset of the subsidies for another year or two.
If there is an agreeement that can deliver 37 Republican votes in the Senate and 160 in the House combined with 20 Democratic Senate votes and 100 in the House, it is a massive liberal ideological victory even in the face of an operational retreat of policy in a conservative direction. At that point the ACA is entrenched as a societal obligation to provide decent insurance to all citizens. The fights at that point will be over which dials to turn and how to implement.
I think this is the most optimistic that I’ve been in the past two months.
Update 1 clarified a sentence on the filibuster
The state of play on repeal and replacePost + Comments (109)