Morning Plum: GOP set to blame Dems for yanking health coverage from millions
In case you missed it, here's Greg Sargent's Plum Line blog post about strategies the GOP may pursue if a Supreme Court ruling on King v. Burwell rejects subsidies for those without their own state-run exchanges and thereby guts the Affordable Care Act.
Yes, it seems diabolical that Republicans could on on the one hand adopt the mantra that market-driven health care is the answer and also work to thwart and indeed overturn the Affordable Health Care at every turn, then blame the Democrats when some variation on that happens, but we're already seeing signs that's the plan.
Forewarned is forearmed.
[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/29/morning-plum-gop-set-to-blame-dems-for-yanking-health-coverage-from-millions/?hpid=z5[/url]
The idea of Republicans blaming Democrats for millions losing subsidies would, in a way, be the perfect coda to the up-is-down, Conservative Entertainment Complex Hall of Mirrors saga that is King v. Burwell. Republicans cheered on this lawsuit explicitly as a way to accomplish what they failed to accomplish through the legislative and electoral process. The current plans for a temporary extension of subsidies that Republicans are floating would also repeal the individual mandate, and thus appear less designed as an actual fix, and more about drawing an Obama veto for the blame-game that will follow.
Meanwhile, Republicans have voted countless times to repeal all of Obamacare for all of its beneficiaries. Democrats will highlight this, and also draw attention to how easy it would be for Republicans to pass a simple one sentence fix that would make the subsidy problem disappear for millions of their own constituents — if they wanted to. Republicans themselves are saying they must come up with a temporary fix plan — or, at least, that they must appear to want to do that. Yet it’s not clear whether Republicans can pass even a fix packaged with a repeal of the mandate, let alone a clean temporary extension of subsidies.
That may ultimately compel Republicans to try for a Plan B. As I noted yesterday, the GOP default plan may be to pass nothing, and blame Obama for creating a law that resulted in the Court gutting health coverage for millions, after lulling all those people into a false sense of economic security that was then snatched away by his incompetence.
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