A month ago House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA)
promised that Republican leadership was on the verge of releasing their comprehensive Obamacare replacement plan. That fell apart almost
immediately and
since then it's only become more apparent that
they've got nothing. They can't get agreement on anything approaching systemic reform, so they're now calling their plan to vote on a bunch of ideas they've been warming over for the past decade
a vision.
The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together.
The tenets of the plan—which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations—are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills.
But this is the first time this year that House leaders will put their full force behind a single set of principles from those bills and present it as their vision.
Notice what's not included? There's nothing about that promise that they would maintain the stuff that people like in Obamacare, the stuff they said they would preserve. Chiefly, they'd scrap the ban on refusing insurance to people with preexisting conditions, and put them all into expensive, inefficient high-risk pools. They say they might back allowing people to stay on their parents' plans until they're 26, otherwise Obamacare and all the protections that come with it would be toast.
Not that it's going to work anyway, not even with House Republicans.
But some conservatives are wary of the push to have House Republicans sing as a unified chorus. At Wednesday’s Weyrich Lunch on Capitol Hill, a gathering of hard-right operatives named after the late conservative strategist Paul Weyrich, there was much skepticism about the leadership’s strategy, with conservatives urging their allies to be cautious.
All Republicans can really agree upon is repeal. Because taking affordable health insurance away from millions of people is their real vision.