Republicans have been licking their chops to repeal Obamacare ever since it was enacted in 2010. Now the moment may finally be within reach—depending on how the Supreme Court rules in
King v. Burwell—and GOP lawmakers have fallen into a trap of their own making. They've repeatedly promised to repeal and they'd have to use a fast-track budget maneuver in order to do so. But there's a hitch, as Rachel Bade
reports:
The plan to use the expedited procedure — called reconciliation — is in flux as lawmakers realize they would have to come up with hundreds of billions in spending cuts to pay for a full repeal of Obamacare. And some Republicans aren’t sure they want to go there.
A new cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office underscored the magnitude of the task: The budget scorekeeper last Friday said a full Obamacare repeal would add $353 billion to the deficit over the next decade. That price tag jeopardizes the GOP plan to use the expedited legislative process for a full repeal because any bill that uses the fast-track procedure, such as subsidy extensions followed by a fuller repeal, must reduce — not increase — the deficit.
Oops! Oh man, turns out it's expensive to undo a law that provides private insurance to more than
9 million Americans already and covers close to
19 million Americans including the medicaid expansion.
Nothing would be more shameless than if Republicans slashed $353 billion from the budget—which will surely come from every domestic program that ever helped disadvantaged people—in order to strip millions of Americans of their health insurance.