After seven years of campaigning nonstop to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, Republicans have finally introduced their long-overdue healthcare “replacement” plan. The plan, which maintains the worst of Obamacare’s actuarially insolvent regulations, pretends that there is a meaningful economic distinction between subsidies and tax credits (note to Republicans: there isn’t), inexcusably kicks the can down the road on reining in the 2010 law’s pernicious Medicaid expansion, and cowers at the almighty altar of no less arcane a figure than the Senate parliamentarian, makes for an overall less-inspiring performance than Mariah Carey’s Times Square meltdown this past New Year’s Eve.
By accepting the procedural premise that one-sixth of the entire U.S. economy can be thoroughly refashioned by a single piece of top-down, heavy-handed legislation, the GOP—the putatively more classical liberal and constitutionalist of our two major parties—has itself capitulated to the overarching framework of FDR’s New Deal: that massive, one-size-fits-all, all-encompassing pieces of regulatory legislation are within the proper aegis of the U.S. Congress.
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