Finally, there might be a plan to replace Obamacare that Republicans can rally behind. Of course, it comes from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and doesn't actually replace Obamacare. But this time around it is an actual plan, with legislation and everything, and not just some
vague stuff said in op-eds by Republicans with "working groups." It is, however, something the
crazies could sign on to.
Cruz has long been adamant that every single word of the Affordable Care Act should be repealed, but his proposed legislation only takes out part of the ACA. It would immediately repeal Title I of the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate the individual and employer mandates, the state-based exchanges, subsidies for purchasing insurance, the protections for people with pre-existing conditions, the requirement that kids can stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, the prohibition on capping lifetime benefits—basically most of what people love and hate about the ACA. Simply put, Cruz wants to strike down most of the policies the ACA put in place to protect consumers from the worst abuses of the insurance market, and in their place he’d put … nothing.
Instead, Cruz’s big idea is to make it easier for insurance companies to sell policies across state lines—an idea that gets incorporated into pretty much every Republican healthcare reform proposal. Let insurers compete with each other in a nationwide market, the thinking goes, and the invisible hand will push healthcare prices down to the point that people can actually afford them and get the coverage they want. That’s Cruz's fanciful vision, at any rate. The reality would be far different—insurance companies would set up shop in the most lightly regulated state(s), sell cheap-as-dirt barebones plans to healthy individuals, and leave the sick and the elderly priced out of the market or denied coverage altogether. The market would be completely skewed in favor of people who don’t actually need healthcare.
But "reality" doesn't matter to most Republicans, or we'd have seen something a little bit more concrete out of them in the past five years that the nation has been debating healthcare reform—something beyond buying insurance across state lines and tort reform, the only two ideas they seem to consistently agree on. In fact, one of the guys
supposedly working on a Senate team to come up with a fix in case the Supreme Court strikes down subsidies, Sen. John Barrasso, is a
co-sponsor of this scorched-earth bill from Cruz.
Still, it's actual legislation, which is pretty much more than any other Republican has come up with so far.