usmbguest5318
Gold Member
It's elected leaders are more likely doomed if they don't.
Nobody thinks the ACA is perfect. It serves, with regard to healthcare/health insurance policy, as the best "point of departure" that could at the time be achieved. Were the GOP to treat it that way and modify it rather than try to trash it, they'd buy themselves a decade's worth of political capital. Doing that requires, however, that modification rather than elimination be one's aim, and that is not the GOP's aim as goes the ACA.
Looking back to Bush II's healthcare policies, one observes, as the Heritage Foundation noted in 2004, that "W" sought to "[make] coverage more affordable [via] a limited expansion of government health programs.
Bush's "health care policy proposals are designed to reinforce the private sector's capacity to expand health coverage and improve the delivery of medical services to Americans. If they take root, these proposals could very well be transformative, improving the financing and delivery of medical services as well as the quality of health care available to the American people. A key achievement of the Bush proposals, if properly implemented, would be to increase personal control and private ownership of health insurance policies."
Well, 2009 arrived and what was hoped for had not come to fruition. Quite simply, more people were not health insured than were prior to his policy implementations. The same cannot be said of the ACA's outcomes.At the end of the day, "jerking around" with health care and health insurance policy comes down to one's answer to one question. Is one's aim to maximize the quantity of Americans who obtain health care when they need it, or is one's aim to maximize something other than that? If one's answer is "the former," one must then accept the reality that any change is going to produce winners and losers, as it were. Recognizing that and maintaining one's focus on health care and people actually obtaining it as they need it, the legislative/policymaking task is that of designing and enacting the solution option that results in the greatest number of people obtaining it when they need it.
Once that's done, the next step is to figure out how to pay for that outcome. Might it be that other purchases might make our money have to be reduced or, in some instances, eliminated? Yes, it almost certainly will require exactly that unless and until are implemented measures that lower the cost of care itself, and that is not at likely to be something the government can assuredly achieve as it does not, for most part, produce medical equipment, sell health insurance, or provide treatment. Cutting back "here" to spend more "there" shouldn't be a difficult concept to "sell" to the American people, not only because there is popular interest in seeing deficits/national debt reduced (or at least slowing the growth of them, even if not outright reversing them) damn near everyone of whom does exactly that on a regular basis.
Simple as that sounds, it's not easy to design the policy to meet the noted goal, and it appears all but impossible for elected leaders to simply tell constituents what they should already know must be so. Because cannot/won't do either of those things, and because they've inaptly defined their goal, the GOP will continue to "fail," even if they manage to pass some sort of ACA replacement.
And let me be clear, the same dubious outcome would beset any party that makes seminal mistakes of the sort I've noted. So, in that regard, it's not just GOP thing.
