Krugman vs conservative Douthat on ACA

[eridani]

Douthat
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/obamacare-lives/

Back when rate shock, website problems and lagging enrollment were threatening to unravel the new health care law before it fully took effect, I concluded a column on Obamacare’s repeated near-death experiences with the following warning to conservatives:

“The welfare state’s ability to defend itself against reform, however, carries a cautionary message for Obamacare’s critics as well. What isn’t killed outright grows stronger the longer it’s embedded in the federal apparatus, gaining constituents and interest-group support just by virtue of its existence even if it doesn’t work out the way it was designed. And as disastrous as its launch has been, if the health care law can survive this crisis in the same limping, staggering way it survived Scott Brown and the Supremes, then it will be a big step closer to being part of the status quo, with all the privileges and political strength that entails.

“So yes — it’s possible that this brush with death will be fatal, possible that the law will fall with the lightest, most politically painless push. But it’s still likely that Obamacare will be undone only if its critics are willing to do something more painful, and take their own turn wrestling with a system that resists any kind of change.”

Obamacare, The Unknown Ideal
Krugman
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/obamacare-the-unknown-ideal/

But we do know that there won’t be an immediate political unraveling, and that we aren’t headed for the kind of extremely-low-enrollment scenario that seemed conceivable just a few months ago, or the possible world where cancellations had ended up outstripping enrollment, creating a net decline in the number of insured. And knowing that much has significant implications for our politics. It means that the kind of welfare-state embedding described above is taking place on a significant scale, that a large constituency will be served by Obamacare (through Medicaid as well as the exchanges) in 2016 and beyond, and that any kind of conservative alternative will have to confront the reality that the kind of tinkering-around-the-edges alternatives to Obamacare that many Republicans have supported to date would end up stripping coverage from millions of newly-insured Americans. That newly-insured constituency may not be as large as the bill’s architects originally hoped, or be composed of the range of buyers that the program ultimately needs. But it will be a fact on the ground to an extent that was by no means certain last December. And that fact will shape, and constrain, the options of the law’s opponents even in the event that Republicans manage to reclaim the White House two years hence.

But Ross Douthat, in the course of realistically warning his fellow conservatives that Obamacare doesn’t seem to be collapsing, goes on to tell them that they’re going to have to come up with a serious alternative.

And what you’ve just defined are the essentials of ObamaRomneyCare. It’s a three-legged stool that needs all three legs. If you want to cover preexisting conditions, you must have the mandate; if you want the mandate, you must have subsidies. If you think there’s some magic market-based solution that obviates the stuff conservatives don’t like while preserving the stuff they like, you’re deluding yourself.

What this means in practice is that any notion that Republicans will go beyond trying to sabotage the law and come up with an alternative is fantasy. Again, Obamacare is the conservative alternative, and you can’t move further right without doing no reform at all.

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: There have been many isolated efforts to define the conservative, or Republican, or libertarian proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare), but there is no one model that the Republicans wish to advance in Congress at this time. The Republican controlled House of Representatives has voted fifty times to repeal ACA, but they have not voted on any substitute to address the widely acknowledged deficiencies in health care financing.

Conservative Ross Douthat and liberal Paul Krugman now provide us with a perspective on the conservative/Republican alternative for reform.

Douthat acknowledges that a conservative goal is to expand coverage (especially for the more vulnerable), whereas the current “tinkering-around-the-edges alternatives to Obamacare that many Republicans have supported to date would end up stripping coverage from millions of newly-insured Americans.” He suggests that the policy restraints of an ACA already in place would force Republicans “in a more serious direction.”

Krugman, on the other hand, writes, “Obamacare IS the conservative alternative.” Not only does it meet many of the conservative goals of insurance reform, it was even designed by the conservatives. The liberal position would have been to support a single payer model.

Single payer was abandoned in favor of the conservative model that would bring Republicans on board with a new, post-partisan president, while liberals would forfeit the single payer advantages in exchange for a politically feasible, bipartisan accord.

Think of where that puts us now. If the conservatives were to gain complete control, they would tweak ACA to loosen regulation of insurers, to reduce federal funding, and to place greater control within the states. If the liberals were to gain complete control, they would tweak ACA to correct many of the defects that were left in place when the negotiations refining the legislation were halted abruptly because of the Democrats having lost a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (not to mention the sabotage of a former Democratic vice-presidential nominee).

The fact that further battles will all take place over on the right is a tragedy. The fundamental structure of ACA is irreparably flawed, as would be any modifications that the Republicans would make to move the insurance function further into the private marketplace. Already we have seen a great multitude of very serious flaws that scream out for remedial legislation. But each new patch creates more complexity. The fundamental infrastructure cannot be repaired by patches. We need a new infrastructure (and it would be better and cheaper!).

Krugman says, “in a better world I’d call for single-payer.” Let’s make this a better world.