We're one week closer to a Supreme Court decision on
King v. Burwell and Republicans have squandered one more week without coming up with some kind of solution for the millions of people who might be losing their health insurance. Never mind that, they're also no closer to a plan for restructuring a healthcare system in the wake of a potential decision from the court which would take those Obamacare subsidies away and destabilize everything. As Jonathan Cohn
writes that decision is less than two months away and Republicans are showing little sense of urgency.
[Rep. Paul] Ryan’s committee, arguably the most powerful in the House, has direct jurisdiction over health care financing. So how many hearings has it held about these contingency plans?
Zero.
And that’s typical. Two other House committees, Education and the Workforce along with Energy and Commerce, have formal jurisdiction over health care financing. They haven’t held hearings, either.
Over in the Senate, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has introduced actual legislation and it has nearly 30 co-sponsors, including Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is the majority leader. But the bill is at best a first draft at legislation and, so far, neither the Finance Committee (which has the most power over health legislation) nor the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (which also has some jurisdiction) has sought testimony or scheduled a hearing--about either the Johnson bill specifically or, more generally, what to do if the Supreme Court stops the tax credits in those 34 states.
There has been one hearing, total, on what to do about
King. It was last week, before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, a backwater committee that "has virtually no jurisdiction over health care financing issues." But at least somebody is at least pretending to care. Now, it's possible that all the action is happening behind the scenes, and if fact that's what Ryan's people told Cohn. The "working group" Ryan
convened back in January. That group is now meeting three times a week and is "informal, but it’s an active group," says Ryan's spokesman, Brendan Buck. They'll need to speed up that activity a bit, considering that a nearly three weeks out of the next seven are going to be taken up by long weekends and Memorial Day recess.
Four weeks is most certainly not long enough to get the Republican House conference together on a plan, and that's not even factoring in the Senate. Five years hasn't been long enough for Republicans to come up with anything remotely resembling a plan to get people covered. If justices Roberts and Kennedy haven't already made up their minds on this case, hopefully they're taking note of the fact that a Republican Congress isn't in any hurry to bail them out of what could be a disastrous decision.