{"id":198100,"date":"2025-10-08T18:05:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T18:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/198100\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T18:05:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T18:05:22","slug":"the-obamacare-repeal-movement-is-dead-long-live-obamacare-repeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/198100\/","title":{"rendered":"The Obamacare Repeal Movement Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare Repeal."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>(Composite by Hannah Yoest \/ Shutterstock)<\/p>\n

To hear Republicans tell it, the current health care system is an abject mess that they\u2014not Democrats\u2014are keen on fixing.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me look right into the camera and tell you clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about health care,\u201d House Speaker Mike Johnson told<\/a> reporters on Monday. \u201cRepublicans are the party working around the clock to fix health care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s remarks provided a rhetorical strategy for other Republicans to use as they push back on Democrats\u2019 demands to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies, the concession they are insisting upon in exchange for helping reopen the government. They want to create the impression that Republicans intend to push broader health care legislation once the government actually reopens.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a problem. If you ask those same Republicans the logical follow-up question\u2014will they move to repeal and replace Obamacare to fix health care?\u2014they get a little shy. In conversations I had with several of them this week, Johnson\u2019s GOP colleagues danced around whether they intend to pursue a comprehensive health policy overhaul. Obamacare is definitely bad, they still insisted, but their remarks often cease there, with no word on how they think it should be fixed, or if it should even be repealed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to take a look at the whole ecosystem of health care,\u201d Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) told me. \u201cThe ironic part of the Affordable Care Act is it made care less affordable, so we actually have to pass something to make care more affordable, to make sure Americans have access to good, high quality care\u2014which is what they expect\u2014and dramatically lower costs. The system is just too expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when asked whether Republicans would take up the cause of repeal-and-replace again, Moreno said any GOP plan would likely not come until the next Congress, and then, only so long as Republicans defend their majorities. His reasoning is that Democrats would be more likely to negotiate on a conservative health care bill if they continued to lose elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy personal preference would be let\u2019s do it holistically, but it\u2019s probably gonna happen after the midterms, because right now Democrats just want to obstruct everything,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if we can beat them pretty soundly in the midterms, we break the fever\u2014meaning they reject the extremists in their base and they come to their senses\u2014where you have Democrats like Joe Manchin that are here. Then you can actually make a deal with the Democrats. And I think we can make that happen. We need to. It\u2019s a big problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

For years, the campaign to repeal and replace Obamacare was a Republican rally mainstay, held up as the party\u2019s central policy offer to voters in election after election. But they never actually acted on the pledge, even when they were in a position to do so. The GOP got so used to repeatedly assuring reporters and the public that their new health care initiative was just around the corner that the claim turned into a running joke among health care reporters<\/a> on the Hill.<\/p>\n

The closest Republicans came to successfully repealing the law was in the 2017 legislation that Sen. John McCain torpedoed with his dramatic thumbs-down vote<\/a> on the Senate floor. After that, it seemed that the party had resigned itself to simply moving on.<\/p>\n

But health care broadly, and Obamacare specifically, is back in the news. Enhanced subsidies that help reduce the cost of purchasing insurance on the ACA marketplaces for around 22 million people are set to expire<\/a> at the end of the year, which could more than double the cost of insurance for those affected. Senate Republicans and their counterparts in the House have expressed no interest in negotiating with Democrats to address the matter\u2014at least not right now, in the context of a government shutdown fight.<\/p>\n

That was the state of play until Monday afternoon, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) broke with her party. In a long, somewhat rambling post on X<\/a>, Greene signaled that while she doesn\u2019t want any illegal immigrants getting any government benefits, she is eager to address the issue of the expiring subsidies now, before her kids\u2019 premiums jump up in the new year. (Who knows what kind of solution she has in mind? Near the end of her post, she added that \u201call insurance is a scam, just to be clear!\u201d)<\/p>\n

I was not in Congress when all this Obamacare, \u201cAffordable Care Act\u201d bullshit started. I got here in 2021. As a matter of fact, the ACA made health insurance UNAFFORDABLE for my family after it was passed, with skyrocketing premiums higher than our house payment.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just say as nicely as possible, I\u2019m not a fan.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m going to go against everyone on this issue because when the tax credits expire this year my own adult children\u2019s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE, along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district. . . .<\/p>\n

Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!<\/p>\n

What\u2019s notable about the Republican intraparty health care debate is the divide that exists between those who lived and worked through the repeated failures of repeal-and-replace in the late 2010s and those who were not yet in Congress during those earlier fights.<\/p>\n

Those with the scar tissue are keen on avoiding getting thrown back into the ring for another Obamacare battle royale. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) avoided giving a direct answer to the question in the disciplined manner of a lawmaker climbing the rungs of Senate leadership.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the talk is the government shutdown, which is what I\u2019m gonna go talk about on the floor,\u201d Barrasso said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ll mention health care in the speech. So you can listen to that if you\u2019d like.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his floor speech, Barrasso said, \u201cObamacare is a failure, Obamacare is broken, and now Democrats are holding the American people hostage to prop it up.\u201d But rather than going on to expand on America\u2019s health care problems\u2014or explicitly call for the ACA to be repealed and replaced, as he once did<\/a>\u2014Barrasso spent the remainder of his ten-ish minutes of floor time accusing Democrats of prioritizing the well-being of undocumented immigrants over that of their fellow Americans.<\/p>\n

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the oldest and longest-serving member of the Senate, responded to my inquiry about a potential GOP health care initiative with a flat \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFifteen years,\u201d Grassley added, indicating that perhaps the ACA has become too ingrained in American society to be done away with. \u201cWell it\u2019s\u2014we\u2019ve always had a\u2014I guess fifteen years is the answer to your question of why you wouldn\u2019t repeal it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of work to improve it, that\u2019s for sure,\u201d chimed in one of his staffers before they disappeared into an elevator.<\/p>\n

The one Republican who both lived through the repeal-and-replace flubs of yesteryear and has expressed support for scrapping the law is, apparently, Sen. Mike Lee. The Utah Republican posted on X<\/a> that the ACA is in dire need of repeal because it \u201cdoesn\u2019t work\u201d and \u201cnever will.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what exactly Lee imagines the alternative might be, or how he\u2019d want to approach replacing the ACA\u2014these are anyone\u2019s guess. Lee eschews the walk-and-talk interviews Capitol Hill reporters rely on to obtain candid answers on various topics, and his X posts don\u2019t typically provide much<\/a> in the way of actual insight into his deeper policy preferences.<\/p>\n

The conversation among Democrats is, naturally, quite different. The party has centered its shutdown strategy on their demand that the enhanced Obamacare subsidies be extended. At the same time, many Democrats have come around to acknowledging that the ACA fell short of their goals for how health care should operate in the United States.<\/p>\n

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who voted to pass the ACA in 2010 and has at times attempted to salvage<\/a> the harder-wearing parts of it since, believes the law doesn\u2019t go far enough in providing care for every American.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot simply defend the status quo in healthcare and the Affordable Care Act\u2014legislation that has provided massive amounts of corporate welfare to the big insurance companies and big drug companies\u2014while premiums, deductibles, co-payments and the price of medicine has soared,\u201d Sanders wrote in an April op-ed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sanders is more representative of how Democrats want to approach health care policy. If they manage to take back control of the House, Senate, and presidency, it would once again become a top agenda item.<\/p>\n

If a deal is to be made on the ACA to get us past the government funding impasse, it will be a narrow one on the issue of subsidies. But even that is more than most Republicans want to think about right now. They couldn\u2019t cobble together a single palatable health care law in the first Trump presidency, and they don\u2019t have any desire to try again.<\/p>\n

Share<\/a><\/p>\n

People on the internet love to discuss dying art forms, often in the context of artificial intelligence applications taking away occasions for real humans to show creativity and effort. But one art form that has diminished because of other factors, too, is criticism.<\/p>\n

Audience capture, the online attention economy, alarming fandoms, and bad financial incentives are some of the reasons that editors and writers increasingly shy away from offering substantial, necessary criticism of books, films, fashion, and music. Those who keep their critical focus end up standing out in a crowd of peddlers of weak and unnecessary praise. (Not to blow our own horns too loudly, but my colleague Sonny Bunch writes and discusses movies honestly, which is why I think so many of my apolitical friends and family who I turned onto The Bulwark now also religiously read Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. And our other culture writing<\/a>\u2014especially our books coverage\u2014is, like Sonny\u2019s, both entertaining<\/a> and uncompromising<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Given my low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by this recent review of Taylor Swift\u2019s new album in Defector. It\u2019s by Kelsey McKinney, who writes:<\/p>\n

Despite my hopes, The Life of a Showgirl is the weakest and least interesting album Swift has ever made. It has no heart, no purpose, no emotional core. And it is transparently clear why that is: because Swift clearly cared more about producing something\u2014anything\u2014that could be sold for profit than about making an album worth buying. It\u2019s not an album. It\u2019s a product for sale, and it sounds like one. . . .<\/p>\n

To create something, anything, good, takes time and desire. \u201cA project that takes five years will accumulate those years\u2019 inventions and richnesses. Much of those years\u2019 reading will feed the work,\u201d Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life. Good creative work draws on the well of your experience, on everything that you consumed and felt and saw over a period of time. If you dip into the well constantly without giving it time to refill, you end up with nothing but pieces of mud, nothing that will satiate a thirst for art.<\/p>\n

Swift hasn\u2019t given herself time to write anything good in years. Since October 2022, Swift has released three full-length albums: Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department, and now Life of a Showgirl. Each of them was weaker than the last. In addition, she has also re-recorded four of her previous albums and released them (with new bonus tracks) as Taylor\u2019s Version editions. During that same time period, she also spent 18 months on the road performing 149 shows on the Eras Tour.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be the first to admit that I\u2019m not in Swift\u2019s target demographic and didn\u2019t feel compelled to seek out reviews of her latest album, but even without seeking them out, I found my social feeds full of sycophantic, uncritical reviews. McKinney\u2019s review is a welcome corrective, and it offers a reminder that reading solid criticism is good for your brain.<\/p>\n

Read the whole review.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Composite by Hannah Yoest \/ Shutterstock) To hear Republicans tell it, the current health care system is an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-198100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}