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Has Mitch McConnell Gone Wobbly On Obamacare?

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Image CreditGage Skidmore
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In the weeks after Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously remarked to President George H.W. Bush that “this was no time to go wobbly.” The Iron Lady’s maxim could well have applied to the Senate majority leader last week, when he made comments suggesting Republicans should have a hand in “fixing” Obamacare—the law collapsing in front of our very eyes—in 2017.

In comments at a Chamber of Commerce event in Louisville last Monday, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said the law “is crashing”—an obvious statement to all but the law’s most grizzled supporters. But McConnell also “said the next president will have to work with Congress to keep the situation from worsening, though he did not specifically say the health care law would be repealed.”

Those last comments in particular—about the imperative to “fix” Obamacare—should cause conservatives to remember three key points.

1. It’s Not Conservatives’ Job to Fix Liberals’ Bad Law

A crass political point, perhaps, but also an accurate one. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid rammed Obamacare through on a straight party-line vote, despite Republicans’ warnings, because, in President Obama’s words, “I’m feeling lucky.” These days, it’s the American people who might not be feeling so lucky, with insurers leaving the insurance exchanges in droves and premiums ready to spike.

Some might ask the reasonable question whether Republicans, as the governing party in Congress, should come together for the good of the country to make President Obama’s disastrous law work. But ask yourself what Democrats would do if the circumstances were reversed: Do you think that, if Republicans had enacted premium support for Medicare or personal accounts for Social Security on a straight-party line vote, and those new programs suffered from technical and logistical problems, Pelosi and Reid would put partisanship aside and try to fix the reformed programs? If you do, I’ve got some land to sell you.

We know Reid and Pelosi wouldn’t come together in the national interest, because they didn’t do so ten years ago to support the surge in Iraq. Instead, they passed legislation undermining the surge and calling for a troop withdrawal. The surge succeeded despite Reid and Pelosi, not because of them. So if Democrats abandoned the national interest to score political points a decade ago, why should Republicans bail them out of their Obamacare woes now?

2. Hillary Clinton’s Proposed ‘Solutions’ Range from Bad to Worse

On health care, Hillary Clinton’s campaign proposals have thus far fallen largely into three buckets: 1) increasing Obamacare subsidies, paid for by tax increases; 2) creating a government-run health plan; and 3) expanding price controls against pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives should endorse exactly none of those proposals. Moreover, Clinton’s proposals would actually exacerbate the exchanges’ fundamental problem: A product too few individuals want to buy because federal regulations and mandates have driven up premiums, making the purchase of coverage irrational for all but the sickest individuals.

But McConnell’s statement that “exactly how it [Obamacare] is changed will depend on the election” implies that a Clinton victory will allow her to set the tone and agenda for negotiations on “fixing” Obamacare. It also implies that Republicans should begin negotiating against themselves, and start rationalizing ways to accept proposals coming from a President Hillary: “Well, we could live with a government-run health plan, provided it were state-based…” or “We might be able to justify billions more in spending on new subsidies if…”

In addition to representing the antithesis of good negotiation, such a strategy brings with it both policy and political risk. Negotiating changes to Obamacare on a bipartisan basis puts Republicans on the hook if those changes don’t work. Clinton’s ideas for more taxes, regulations, and spending won’t make the exchanges solvent; if anything, they will only postpone the inevitable for a while longer.

3. Ridiculous Straw Men Can’t Justify Bailouts

Insurance industry spokesmen have been flooding Republican offices on Capitol Hill making this argument: Congress has to grant insurers massive new bailouts, or the American people will end up with a government-run health plan, or worse, single-payer health care.

That argument relies on several levels of specious reasoning. Unless Republicans lose both houses of Congress in November—a possible outcome, but an unlikely one—insurers’ argument pre-supposes that a Republican Congress will vote to enact a government-run health plan, or single-payer health care. As liberals themselves have pointed out, only one Democrat running for Senate this year even mentioned the so-called “public option” on his website. So why is this government-run health plan even a concern, when Reid couldn’t enact it in 2009 with a 60-vote Senate majority?

The honest answer is it probably isn’t—insurers are just trying to scare Republicans into bailing them out. It’s the oldest straw-man argument in the book: We must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do this.

If you don’t believe me, just read the following: “Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it the most. And more will die as a result. We know these things to be true.”

Those words come from none other than Barack Obama, as he tried to sell Obamacare in his address to Congress in September 2009. We know where that speech led us, and we should know better than to follow such illogical reasoning again.

Phineas Taylor Barnum once famously remarked that “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Here’s hoping that Republicans will disprove that adage next year, and decline to accept the sucker’s bet associated with trying to fix an inherently unfixable law.