Gingrich I Don t Want to Repeal ObamaCare and Neither Does Congress
Sunday, 29 March 2015
Gingrich: I Donāt Want to Repeal ObamaCare, and Neither Does Congress
Written by Michael Tennant
Although heās found that ObamaCare isnāt all itās cracked up to be, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (shown) doesnāt think it should be repealed outright ā and, he added, neither do congressional Republicans, notwithstanding their rhetoric to the contrary.
āEven the best estimate for ObamaCare is that at a very high cost it is extending the number of people who are insured by a small number,ā Gingrich said during an interviewwith USA Todayās Jayne OāDonnell at the World Health Care Congress in Washington, D.C., March 25.
Gingrich is correct. As The New American reported in January, the latest Congressional Budget Office projections have the federal government spending nearly $2 trillion over the next decade to insure fewer than half of uninsured Americans.
Moreover, as Gingrich pointed out, most of the increase in coverage has come about by ādramatically expand[ing] Medicaid,ā which is an āeasy short-term fix.ā
āThe problem then becomes,ā he continued, āwhoās going to pay for Medicaid.ā (Answer: taxpayers until they are bled dry.)
Another problem with the expansion of Medicaid is that the program already pays well below doctorsā actual costs. Thatās why, according to a survey by healthcare-staffing firm Merritt Hawkins, in 2013 only half of family doctors were accepting Medicaid patients. Adding even more people to the Medicaid rolls has only exacerbated the matter: A December report from the Department of Health and Human Servicesā Office of Inspector General found that just half of physicians who accept Medicaid patients are taking new ones.
āHaving insurance with no doctor may not be better than having a doctor with no insurance,ā observed Gingrich.
The individual mandate, too, isnāt quite working as expected, he said, pointing to the fact that āa lot of people are paying the penalty rather than being in the mandate.ā
Challenged by OāDonnell about his past support for an individual mandate, Gingrich said that he no longer favors it ābecause in order to make an individual mandate work, you have to move to an extraordinarily authoritarian system.ā Yet Gingrich is known to have stumped for a mandate as early as 1993 ā claiming it was the conservative alternative to the complete nationalization of healthcare being pushed at the time by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton ā and continued speaking in favor of it until just before he jumped into the 2012 presidential race. Considering that it should have been obvious from day one that enforcing an individual mandate would require authoritarian means, one suspects that politics, rather than principle, have shaped Gingrichās view of the mandate over the years.
In spite of his misgivings about many aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Gingrich made it clear that heās not in favor of repealing it.
āThere are a certain number of people from your party that say they just want [the ACA] repealed,ā OāDonnell said. āIt doesnāt sound like you agree with that.ā
āWell, they donāt, either,ā replied Gingrich, precipitating a round of laughter from both OāDonnell and the audience. Instead, he said, theyāll just repeal the parts they donāt like while retaining the politically popular ones.
For instance, the individual mandate is unpopular, but the provision forcing insurers to cover all applicants regardless of pre-existing conditions is well-liked, so Congress might want to repeal the former but not the latter. But doing that, he averred, would ācreate a death spiral in which people never buy insurance till theyāre sickā ā something that may already be happening with the full ACA in place but could become far worse if it were only partially repealed.
Gingrich, not quite grasping the economic or constitutional issues at stake, then suggested an alternative: āsome system that says once you buy your first insurance, as long as youāre paying insurance, you cannot be denied coverage.ā
Another popular provision that the GOP probably wouldnāt jettison is the one allowing children to remain on their parentsā health insurance until age 26. āI donāt think itās repealable,ā Gingrich said.
āSo,ā he continued, āif you actually went down [to Congress] and said, āNow, when you say you want to repeal everything, how about these five things?ā youād suddenly find, well, repeal sort of means repeal but not necessarily repeal, but itās a kind of repeal that youād really like because itās only the parts you want to repeal, itās not the parts you donāt want to repeal because weāre only going to repeal the things that need to be repealed.ā
Gingrich was, of course, being somewhat facetious, but his point is borne out by the GOPās most recent ObamaCare repeal-and-replace proposal. Unveiled in early February, it calls for, among other things, preventing insurers from denying coverage as long as the covered individual has paid his premiums faithfully in the past, retaining the provision allowing children to remain on their parentsā coverage into young adulthood, subsidizing insurance premiums, and otherwise continuing many of the ACAās policies with only slight modifications ā hence the Washington Post's reference to the plan as āObamacare Lite.ā
Despite his ongoing posturing as a conservative ā Gingrich told OāDonnell that ācentralized, bureaucratic solutions are increasingly obsoleteā ā the former House Speaker remains ever in thrall to command-and-control approaches to solving mankindās problems. (He even called for a ānational brain projectā as a way of addressing the growing challenge of Alzheimerās disease.) Sadly, so do most of his comrades in the Republican Party.[/quote ]
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