With oral arguments in King v. Burwell just eight days away, Republicans are talking more and more about what they’ll do if the Supreme Court sides with them and effectively wipes out subsidized Obamacare insurance in two-thirds of the states.
On Monday, it was Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) speaking at the Heritage Foundation, where he promised to unveil a “short-term” fix that would avoid disruption — thereby giving Republicans time to come up with a permanent alternative to the Affordable Care Act. On Tuesday, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) joined the fray with a Wall Street Journal op-ed that sketched out what such a plan might look like.
Should you take this talk seriously? Republicans have been promising to craft alternatives to Obamacare for as long as they’ve been trying to wipe it off the books — in other words, for nearly the entire five years that the law has been in existence. They’ve come nowhere close to coalescing around a serious proposal. In this case, inaction may speak louder than words. At best, improving access to health care doesn’t seem to be a priority for the GOP. At worst, it’s not something they appear inclined to do at all.
Gramm’s op-ed reveals this as well as anything you’ll read or hear these days. In the piece, Gramm warns his fellow Republicans that if they get the ruling they hope for in King v. Burwell, it will unleash policy and political chaos. Without Obamacare’s subsidies, which can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, millions of lower- and middle-income Americans would suddenly find insurance unaffordable — and would almost certainly have to give up coverage altogether. This, Gramm says, would place enormous pressure on state and federal officials to take immediate action.
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Conservatives like Gramm may object to such arrangements on principle, and they are of course entitled to that view. But a world without such requirements would almost certainly be a world where fewer people would have comprehensive insurance — and where the people who really need help paying their medical bills would struggle most to get it.
