Nope. Orrin Hatch still doesn't have a plan.
Three Republican senators, Lamar Alexander (TN), John Barrasso (WY) and Orrin Hatch (UT) kick off this week in which the Supreme Court will decide whether to strip health insurance subsidies away from millions by
penning an op-ed designed to tell the court "go ahead and gut the law, we have a plan." There's just one problem. It's not technically a plan. It's not even an outline of a plan. Here's the sum total of what they're offering.
We would provide financial assistance to help Americans keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period. It would be unfair to allow families to lose their coverage, particularly in the middle of the year.
How long is the transition period? Where will the money come from? We don't know because they don't say.
Second, we will give states the freedom and flexibility to create better, more competitive health insurance markets offering more options and different choices.
That's actually already
in the law. States can apply for waivers beginning in 2017 to devise their own systems. How will this not-really-a-plan change that? Who knows!?!? Apparently not for Alexander, Barrasso, or Hatch, since they don't say.
That's it. That's what they got. This "plan" is so devoid of substance that this is how the AP is reporting it for their "Big Story": [The senators] provide no detail on how much assistance they would propose, its duration or how they would pay for it. Nor do they address how they would overcome GOP divisions or Democratic opposition to weakening the law."
Here's how the senators address that GOP divisions part: "We have had many discussions with our Senate and House Republican colleagues on this issue, and there is a great deal of consensus on how to proceed." Right, just like there's so much consensus about how to not shut down government between House and Senate Republicans. While the stalemate over Homeland Security funding bleeds into its second week, these three Senate Republicans want the people—and the Supreme Court—to believe that House Republicans would actually pass a fix to Obamacare that came from Senate Republicans. When House Republicans won't even fund national security.
Two months into the new Republican Congress and five years after the law was passed and this is what they have to offer. Nothing.