Weigel previews what Republicans might do to the law if they take control of the Senate:
Every Republican senator and candidate knows that the Affordable Care Act passed in the budget reconciliation process, the only way to get a bill through without the threat of cloture. Every one of them thinks reconciliation can be used to gut it. “I think we got something with this tax issue,” McConnell reportedly told aides after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare while defining its health care mandate as a tax. “Figure out how to repeal this through reconciliation.”
McConnell no longer talks like that in public. In a revealing interview with Politico’sManu Raju, McConnell walked through all of his 2015 priorities, all the ways they could be forced through in the budget process. He didn’t promise to repeal Obamacare. He didn’t even say that in a secret (then leaked) speech to a donor conference organized by the Kochs. The current plan is to use next year’s budget process to chip away at the law by ending the medical device tax, or ending the employer mandate, and forcing the president to veto or accept it. Basically, look at what the health care industry wants to change, then expect Republicans to agree with it.
Meanwhile, James Capretta and Yuval Levin suggest ways for Republicans to transition away from Obamacare:
[T]he insurance provisions of Obamacare have now moved millions of people into new coverage arrangements. Granted, many of those who have switched to new insurance plans did so because they concluded they had no other choice, and they would welcome a law that freed them up to get the kind of insurance they would prefer. For these people, the transition could be swift. But Obamacare also provides massive new subsidies to a relatively small portion of the population, and undoing those arrangements abruptly would be both unfair and unwise. Obamacare’s opponents should not make the same mistake its champions made in designing and implementing it.
Building in an adequate transition will not undermine the ultimate effectiveness of an Obamacare replacement plan. The goal is a functioning marketplace where consumers decide how to allocate resources, where all Americans have access to stable insurance, where quality care and medical innovation are rewarded, and where federal support for insurance enrollment is affordable for taxpayers. These are goals that are critically important for the long-term strength and vitality of the country, and they are goals that are more likely to be reached if Obamacare’s opponents wisely design short-term transition provisions to defuse opposition to a full replacement plan.
The Dish 