No one has ever accused Congress of working too hard, but the futile effort to bail out Obamacare subsidies is one area the legislative branch could learn to work smarter, not harder.
For not the first time, some Republicans spent months working on a plan to bail out Obamacare, only to have it end in predictable failure. It brings to mind the old saying about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
The Hyde Amendment Is a Binary Choice
Go back to the fall of 2017, after the collapse of Obamacare “repeal-and-replace” legislation. At that time, Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander and Democrat Sen. Patty Murray, then the chairman and ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, respectively, crafted legislation to “stabilize” (i.e., bail out) the insurance Exchanges. At the time of the bill’s introduction, I noted that the draft legislation did not include Hyde Amendment protections, designed to ensure that taxpayer funds would not go to insurance plans that cover abortion.
Alexander admitted to a reporter at the time that he did not know whether funds provided by the bill would go to plans covering abortion. (Spoiler alert: They would.) Lawmakers then spent six months, from October 2017 through March 2018, attempting to find some type of “compromise” around the abortion issue that would allow congressional Republicans to vote for an Obamacare bailout.
But as I wrote near the end of that debate, it was obvious from the start that there was no middle ground on the abortion issue. Ryan was desperate to bail out Obamacare — so much so that his staff tried to contrive an illegal budget gimmick to ease the way for the bailout’s passage. But in the end, the abortion issue proved intractable. Republicans felt they couldn’t vote for a bill unless it prohibited all Obamacare plans from covering elective abortion, and Democrats couldn’t vote for a bill with such a restriction. The “stability” bill collapsed without receiving so much as a vote in either chamber of Congress.
Déjà vu All Over Again
In recent days, multiple reports have indicated that a plan to revive the Covid-era enhanced insurance subsidies that expired at the beginning of this year had effectively died, largely over the same issues that plagued negotiations in 2017 and 2018. Both Republicans and Democrats agreed that issues surrounding federal funding of abortion were the prime sticking point; Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine said that “Hyde language was an obstacle.”
Republican Sen. Susan Collins admitted that the current negotiations were “certainly difficult.” But the better question is, why did she think these discussions would ever succeed? Collins, like Paul Ryan, desperately wanted to pass the “stability” bill in 2017-18, even getting a commitment from then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in favor of it.
But Collins herself saw that bill collapse, to the point that she never followed through on her request for a floor vote, likely because she knew the legislation would tank. At the time, she called it “baffling and gravely disappointing” that Democrats should use the abortion issue “to block” passage of the bailout.
This time, one can turn her phrasing on its head: given her own personal experience, it’s baffling why Collins would have thought this year’s negotiations would end in a bipartisan agreement. Unless, of course, her efforts over the past several months amounted to a performative exercise so that Collins, who faces a tough reelection campaign in November, could show a commitment to bipartisanship.
Waste of Time
At the end of the last debate, in March 2018, a staffer emailed me to point out that I had told people six months ago what would happen, yet lawmakers had persisted in their fruitless efforts to square an impossible circle. Not content to waste months of time and effort only once, they did the exact same thing this time around.
An old aphorism notes that “there’s no educational value in the second kick of a mule.” Had congressional Republicans spent the past several months focused on developing and promoting better alternatives to Obamacare, rather than engaging in a pointless exercise that everyone with a sense of history understood was bound to end in failure, they — and we — would have been much better off.
