Republicans help promote Obamacare, but hey -- tax cuts!

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It turns out Republicans fully support government-run health care, despite the
collapse of the entire system. They just didn’t like the tax increases funding
Obamacare, because Republicans are for servicing socialism through debt,
whereas Democrats do it by raising taxes.

The group Americans for Tax Reform is already bragging about the GOP bill’s $1
trillion tax cut. That’s really nice. We can address that with tax policy. But
what about our destroyed health care system, which costs the average family
thousands per year in premiums and deductibles and drives up the actual cost of
the supply side of health care? Health care is the single biggest driver of the
deficit, dependency, and economic stagnation, and government-run and regulated
health care and insurance is the single biggest reason health care is
unaffordable for too many people. What are we going to do about that?

I’m a strong supply-sider and would love tax cuts, but unshackling the most
important sector of our economy will do more to grow the economy than any tax
cut. One reason why Europe has stagnated for decades is because of socialized
medicine. It’s no coincidence that since government-run health care in America
has reached a tipping point, we have never reached three percent growth and
struggle for even one or two percent.

Republicans have a habit of playing chase the squirrel. Whenever the tab comes
due to fulfill a promise on one issue, they immediately discuss another issue.
When the time comes to defund Planned Parenthood, they talk about other random
provisions in the budget, but when the time comes to restore a free market in
health care, they talk about taxes and Planned Parenthood.

The taxes have nothing to do with destroying health care. Most of the revenue
in the Obamacare tax increases comes from the increased payroll tax on the
wealthy and the 3.8 percent surtax on investment income. The main tax that
dealt with health insurance – the tax on “Cadillac plans” – was never actually
implemented. Tax increases are never good for the economy, but they had nothing
to do with destroying the health care system. It is government-run health care,
through regulations, subsidies, and Medicaid expansion that has destroyed
health care. Republicans love all those elements.

As such, Republicans have no right to complain about tax hikes needed to fund
programs they themselves deem indispensable.

As I’ve questioned before, how can liberal Republicans rail against the taxes
and mandates if they fully support, laud, defend, and fight for the key
elements of Obamacare? Once you agree that we need the actuarily insolvent
regulations, every economist – from right to left – will tell you that we need
an individual and employer mandate so that younger and healthier people pay
into the system and don’t game it out. And once you are funding the cost-
crushing subsidies and Medicaid expansion, which they love so dearly, where is
the money going to come from? Taxes, of course. As such, Democrats were right
to raise taxes primarily on the very wealthy.

What exactly is their complaint?

The coming humiliation in the Senate that will make Obamacare popular

Meanwhile, Republicans are already preemptively destroying our messaging on
health care. The problem with the bill that passed the House is not just the
details and structure, although it is a terrible bill, which was made only
slightly better by the Freedom Caucus. The problem is the messaging and
principles espoused that led to this point and that will only deteriorate in
the Senate. This deal was forged to merely get “something passed” as if it were
a kidney stone, as Rep. Tom Massie quipped, not a soothing medicine needed to
heal an ailment. The real problem is that Republicans have already adopted all
of the premises and messaging of the other side. As Mark Levin said earlier
this week, “Rather than confront the Left at the base of their arguments,
Republican officials by and large live in fear of principles they proclaim at
election time but reject at governing time.”

To use an MMA analogy, Republicans have managed to take their winning issue,
with Democrats lying unconscious on the mat, and reverse the roles by placing
themselves into the losing side of a ground-and-pound.

Where are the Republicans pounding the lectern and speaking to the morality of
the issue: how thanks to Obamacare, nobody will have any health care or health
insurance; how Iowa might be added to the list of states without insurers
thanks to the very mandates these clowns support; how Maryland insurers will
experience up to a 150 percent increase in premiums after some Marylanders
already saw premiums triple and double; how eastern Tennessee cancer patients
can’t get insurance and how premiums in Alaska cost up to $50,000; how
Obamacare has created an immoral government-sponsored monopoly for the few
insurers that remain?

Instead, Republicans in the Senate will merely focus on Democrat talking points
about coverage and pre-existing conditions and just make this bill more
liberal. Because the House kept the subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and critical
regulations, the door is open for the Senate GOP to take that baseline and
focus further on the need to retain or even add more on all three levels rather
than address the actual problem.

Without actually driving down prices by healing the free market, Republicans
have placed themselves on the hook for further subsidization. They have kept
the market-distorting and price-hiking regulations and subsidies – exacerbated
by the elimination of the individual and employer mandates. This will place
them on defense to raise Medicaid spending even more and dump more money into
the high-risk pools. Their $15 billion over nine years is a joke. Instead,
Republicans should have completely repealed the regulations and subsidies to
drive down prices for almost everyone (especially because Medicaid expansion is
already responsible for 80 percent of those who obtained coverage, which is
being retained in this bill) and then dumped $250 billion into the high-risk
pools as the full replacement. Hence full repeal and full replace instead of 20
percent insolvent repeal and half-assed replace.

House Whip Rep. Steve Scalise is already talking about how “everyone with pre-
existing conditions will have affordable coverage” – a utopian goal that
implicitly exonerates Democrats and government-run health care from creating
the pre-existing condition problem in the first place.

President Trump is praising Australia’s single-payer system.

Rather than pound the lectern and demand our right to free market health care,
speak about the immoral government intervention that tethered health insurance
to employment, and actually educate the public on the difference between
insurance and health care, Senator Bill Cassidy, RINO-La., one of the top
Senate Republicans leading the health care debate, is echoing Bernie Sanders on
health care being a right. He’s preemptively ascribing blame for losing
coverage on the Republican “repeal” effort rather than on Obamacare itself and
the daily news stories! If Republicans would simply shut their mouths, the news
cycle on Obamacare would speak for itself. Yet they are sabotaging the repeal
effort by saddling free market health care with the vices that are inherent in
Obamacare every time they speak.

But fear not. When we become Greece and have single-payer health care with 0.3
percent GDP growth every year, Republicans will lower your taxes.

: Daniel Horowitz is a senior editor of Conservative Review.

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