GOP Swiftly Rejects Obama's 'One-Sentence Fix' to Obamacare if Supreme Court Voids SubsidiesThe GOP has five plans for dealing with the end of subsidies. All of them effectively destroy Obamacare. Only three of them even exist in bill form. Republicans don't feel any urgency about solving this problem, or even about being seen as trying to solve it. In this situation, they're not interested in being liked, or in being perceived as "caring about people like you," as the pollsters like to put it.
... At the G7 conference in Germany on Monday, the president said if the justices strip subsidies from millions of Americans, "Congress could fix this whole thing with a one-sentence provision" making clear that Healthcare.gov subsidies are available in all 50 states. Republicans quickly fired off a rebuttal.
"Let's be clear: if the Supreme Court rules against the Administration, Congress will not pass a so called ‘one-sentence’ fake fix," Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, who is leading Republican efforts to craft a contingency plan, said in a statement.
What Republicans want is to create a situation in which, a year from now, we don't even remember what real Obamacare was like -- we don't remember how it functioned when it functioned properly. They want us to become acclimated to a world in what we have now is seen as simply unattainable -- it will be, of course, because of Republican intransigence -- and our choices are the chaotic status quo or whatever Republicans propose as an alternative (which will essentially be what we had before Obamacare, either as it was or with the addition of the usual Republican snake oil -- bad insurance policies sold across state lines, malpractice awards curbed under "tort reform").
The thing is, we won't remember. Conservative voters remember every political grievance, but the rest of us don't. Did we remember the government shutdown of 2013 when we went to the polls in 2014? No -- Republicans made huge gains in the House and Senate, and in state and local races. We always forget the awful things Republicans do. Two years after George W. Bush left office, we gave Congress back to his party; two years after Republicans impeached Bill Clinton, we said "meh" to Clinton's vice president and allowed the GOP back into the White House.
We won't continue to fight for the one-sentence fix. We won't punish the party that refused to sign off on it. We'll accept that Republicans have the power to limit our choices and meekly ask them to treat the wound they inflicted, because we never respond to Republicans with the sustained outrage they deserve.
Please, America, prove me wrong on this.