If Republicans can't even handle Obamacare now, how will they handle it in November?
Terri Lynn Land, former Michigan Secretary of State and current Republican Senate candidate, holds her first press briefing since announcing her candidacy last year and when she gets a question about the implications of repealing Obamacare's ban on denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, she had to
hand things over to a staffer, and:
The aide who leapt to Land’s defense made a glaring error after attempting to take the call off the record.
The glaring error? This wildly inaccurate assertion:
The problem with Obamacare is that it allows people to wait until they’re very sick to purchase insurance, which creates significant and unknown risks to insurers and then the insurance companies would pass that cost on to consumers.
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That's just not true. That's why there is a March 31 deadline and that's why there's an individual mandate. Like it or not, Obamacare is designed to create a rational marketplace—not to encourage free riders.
But even if it were true, it doesn't explain what Land's alternative would be. According to her staffer, "the way ... Terri’s plan addresses pre-existing conditions is continuous coverage and portability."
That's gobbledygook. To the extent it has any meaning at all, what Land's aide is saying is that under her plan, everyone will already have insurance because they can take it from job to job, so therefore the issue of pre-existing conditions won't be relevant. But that's absurd; not every job offers health insurance and even if did, not everyone has a job. And to make portability work, you'd need to put everyone in a marketplace like the individual market. If Land were serious, which she's not, that would mean Obamacare for all.
Keep in mind that it's still March. We've got a little less than 8 months to go until the elections. If Republicans are already struggling this mightily to offer up a coherent explanation of how they would deal with the horror stories that would result from repealing Obamacare, just imagine how bad it will be in October and November when Obamacare is even more firmly entrenched?
