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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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In Our View: GOP, Improve Health Care

It's past time for Republicans to stop attacking law and start making it better

The Columbian
Published:

Following last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding the Affordable Care Act, the experience of Cathy McMorris Rodgers should have provided an abject lesson for Congressional Republicans.

In March, the Congresswoman from Spokane posted a query asking her followers to share their horror stories about Obamacare. Instead, she was inundated with success stories, more than 10,000 of them. “My story is that I once knew seven people who couldn’t get health insurance,” one person wrote. “Now they all have it, thanks to the ACA and President Obama, and their plans are as good as the one my employer provides — and they pay less for them.” Or, as another wrote, “Obamacare saved us when my husband was unemployed and couldn’t afford coverage. We might have been ruined without it.”

There were more, many more, but the point has been made. And still that point was lost on Republicans in Congress last week when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld, by a 6-3 vote, a key provision of Obamacare. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, said, “Today’s Supreme Court ruling does not change the fact that Obamacare continues to hurt hardworking American families and businesses.”

For more than five years now, that has been the mantra of Republicans in Washington, D.C., and that mantra has grown tiresome. The American public deserves better from its representatives than constant sniping and scant efforts to improve the landmark health-care law. As Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, said last year, “There are better solutions to ensure Americans who are young, or struggling, or living with a pre-existing condition can access good health care.” But Republicans have been loath to put forth those solutions.

Much of this is due to the obtuse nature in which Obamacare was passed in 2010. With little Republican input and no Republican support, Democrats who controlled Congress at the time hammered through the health care reform and created an untenable tension between the parties. That was inexcusable, with the quote from then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., serving as a low point in Congressional intransigence: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”

Since then, however, Republicans have spent much time embarrassing themselves and poorly serving the American public. The court ruling last week in King v. Burwell had the potential to disqualify 6 million people from receiving subsidies for signing up for Obamacare, which was preceded by an absurd tweet from Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.: “Six million people risk losing their health care subsidies, yet (President Obama) continues to deny that Obamacare is bad for the American people.”

Thune apparently failed to recognize that most of those 6 million people would not have insurance were it not for Obamacare. And he certainly failed to recognize that what is really bad for the American people is dozens of attempts to scuttle the health care plan without offering a viable alternative.

Herrera Beutler has rightly criticized her own party for failing to develop solutions, but she also was asked by Newsmax in February how many times Republicans have voted to overturn Obamacare and was quoted as saying, “Not often enough. And there won’t be enough votes until Obamacare is finally repealed.”

It is time — it is past time — for Republicans to abandon that approach and to work on improving the law rather than persistently attempting to undermine it. As Cathy McMorris Rodgers can attest, their current approach is not working.

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