New numbers on healthcare costs highlight, yet again, how much of a dereliction of duty it will be if congressional Republicans don’t take another crack this year at replacing Obamacare.
The Congressional Budget Office reported on Wednesday that premiums for the basic Obamacare plan will rise 15 percent next year, despite overall price inflation in the rest of the economy remaining at or below 2 percent.
The huge price hikes will not be a one-time thing, either. “Going forward, the agency projects premiums will increase an average of 10% a year between 2019 and 2023 and then 5% annually between 2024 and 2028,” reported CNN.
And this comes on top of whopping premium hikes averaging 25 percent in 2017 and 34 percent in 2018. These cost increases are not just unsustainable, but arguably immoral. Public policy that allows, or even drives, such repeatedly unsustainable costs for healthcare is public policy which fails every test of competence and decency.
Yet congressional leaders (especially in the Senate), burned by last year’s epic failures to pass reforms for the failed Obamacare system, are completely ignoring the issue. This is political cowardice in its rawest form.
In 2017, reform efforts effectively fell just one vote short on several occasions. Falling one short shouldn’t mean the job is undoable; it means victory is almost achieved.
As I’ve reported this year twice before, there is good reason to believe that a system of block grants plus vastly expanded health savings accounts, opt-out plans for individuals, and funds dedicated to the states for patients facing the greatest health challenges can both work better in practice than Obamacare and secure the votes needed for Senate passage.
The open process being used in this year’s effort should meet the procedural concerns duly and wisely expressed last year by Sen. John McCain (or his replacement if the Arizona Republican chooses to retire), while a new formula assuring Medicaid-expansion states that they won’t lose money in the early years of the block-grant system should reassure moderate Republicans such as Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
And now that the individual mandate has been already repealed through tax reform, the Congressional Budget Office (working from the new baseline) may well “score” a new plan as increasing the number of people ultimately finding one of the forms of insurance now made available or more affordable.
Last year, nobody in office made a good sales job about not only why Obamacare needs repeal, but about why conservative solutions will actually work better. Last year, President Trump rushed things out of the gate too fast; House hardliners torpedoed the effort for too long; neither chamber held proper hearings; and the grass-roots activists weren’t really included in the process.
This time, a plan is emerging from the grass roots, carefully enough so that multiple prior kinks are being worked out.
Word on the street is that the business community — happy that the emerging plan significantly delays the medical-device tax, the “Cadillac tax,” and the health-insurance tax, plus eliminating Obamacare’s employer mandate — is coming on board to the effort.
The grass-roots effort for healthcare reform could hand Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a chance, on at least a bronze platter if not a silver one, to get back in front of a successful parade. In fact, my anecdotal feelers indicate that unhappiness with McConnell’s failure to deliver seems to be growing — not just among conservative activists, but also the business establishment. This could be McConnell’s last big chance to reverse that trend and to cement a “can-do” legacy — to accomplish what the cynics all said was impossible by slaying a supposedly unslayable government behemoth.
And, let it be noted, to do so by giving Americans more choices, at lower costs, for better care.
Republican senators such as Wyoming’s John Barrasso, Texas’ John Cornyn, and Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, previously skeptical about the political feasibility of conservative reforms, are reportedly warming to the task.
As one wise conservative veteran told me this week, “Sitting on the sidelines on health care, with premiums rising as fast as they are, is a very, very, very dangerous political approach.”
It’s time for congressional leaders to stop being defeatist. It’s time to win one for good public policy, for an electoral boost, and for the good of the public.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic, a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
