Good. Lets get it right this time. Repeal and replace with something looking like a free market, now, not after some future election.
WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders and the White House, under extreme pressure from conservative activists, have restarted negotiations on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, with House leaders declaring that Democrats were celebrating the law’s survival prematurely.
Just days after President Trump said he was moving on to other issues, senior White House officials are now saying they have hope that they can still score the kind of big legislative victory that has so far eluded Mr. Trump. Vice President Mike Pence was dispatched to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for lunchtime talks.
“We’re not going to retrench into our corners or put up dividing lines,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said after a meeting of House Republicans that was dominated by a discussion of how to restart the health negotiations. “There’s too much at stake to get bogged down in all of that.”
The House Republican whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, said of Democrats, “Their celebration is premature. We are closer to repealing Obamacare than we ever have been before.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/us/politics/health-care-obamacare-freedom-caucus.html
I think that the President made it clear that he did not see the issue as at all simplistic in agreeing to the Ryan approach as a first of at least three steps to get the Bureaucracy supervising Health Care off of the backs of American medical care provisioning.
I think the essential thing, now, is that we keep moving forward in the quest. So long as many Republicans still cling to the folly that the Federal Government has a proper role in civilian health care, the progress back to what actually works will be slow.
The fundamental fallacy driving Federal involvement is the egalitarian-collectivist mindset, that premises unlimited claims to power, so long as those claiming power seek to level the conditions of those subject of their power.
In the Jacobin & Bolshevik revolutions, the orchestrators assumed the "right" to freely slaughter those who offended by having wealth & land, or being connected with organized religion. Since LBJ on the Health Care front, the egalitarian collectivists have been endeavoring to make certain that medical care was provided equally to rich & poor, healthy & unhealthy, provident & improvident.
Other than this Jacobin/Marxist obsession with leveling humanity, there is no rational reason to intrude a far off bureaucracy into something as inherently immediate, inherently local, as the relationship between physician & patient. Nor is the obsession really excusable on a pretense of the special needs of the person with a medical "precondition" (so far as the insurance industry is concerned).
The oath that physicians have been taking for 2300 years, requires them to treat the person with the "precondition," whether that person can pay or not. (Policing the insurance industry in this manner--not a role granted in the Federal Constitution--is a ridiculous red herring, when you recognize the effect of that ancient, but ongoing oath.)
LBJ's 1965 intrusion, tripled the percentage of our GDP that went to Health Care. Obama's ACA was a piling on an already developing disaster.
One other very clear factor. Whereas the far less regulated computer related fields have seen immense cost reductions, as the power of innovation increased; the cost of new technology in the over meddled with provision of Health Care, has exploded upwards.
Does anyone not understand that imposing layers of bureaucracy does not help the conscientious physician in addressing the unique situation of each afflicted patient; that you cannot treat unique individuals by arbitrary check lists; that Government regulated health care--and simply deciding the extent of funding for whatever is a form of regulation;--can never be an improvement over the care furnished by skilled people, honorably required to do the best they can for each unique individual in each unique situation.
(And believe it or not, many of those now hobbled physicians actually know more about health care than the bureaucrats in Washington!)
How about just repeal? All the Republicans want that, at least they did last year. So pass what they can agree on...and agree to disagree on any kind of replacement?
Remember all that talk that’s its done, over, settled (science), blah, blah...as if starting to talk again was not going to happen.
Suggestions?
Here’s the issue. We haven’t had free market healthcare since the late 1800s. Are we ready to say ER can reject patients that can’t pay? If we are then we can do the free market and everyone can/will save a lot. Get the FDA out of business and downscale nearly all federal oversight (if not all). Gov’t get completely out of insurance regulation too. They are both in bed with each other.
Until then we will have some form of gov’t healthcare.