Three Cheers for the Republicans Who Let McConnellCare Sink!

You can’t have a workable insurance market and force insurers to cover those with preexisting conditions

David Hogberg July 19, 2017

Kudos to Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Jerry Moran (R-Ks.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for putting an end to the proposed “Better Care Reconciliation Act,” a.k.a. McConnellCare. And kudos to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.) for opposing it too, even though she did so for the wrong reasons.

Now the GOP can get on with other issues like tax reform and go back to the drawing board on health care reform. (Editor’s note: As this article was being edited, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the Senate would vote on Obamacare repeal – straight repeal, not replacement – next week.)

As usual, we have conservative commentators accusing these senators of being purists. Jim Geraghty thinks these Republican senators opposed McConnellCare because it left in place some of Obamacare’s tax hikes, ones that could have been removed in tax reform later in the year. “But no,” Geraghty writes, “these guys have to torpedo this particular bill, and its effort at improvement, in the name of some theoretical much better version that has yet to be written.”

Alas, I doubt Moran and Lee would have held out on the taxes. Rather, the main problem was the efforts by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Tin Ear) to keep Obamacare’s “protections” for preexisting conditions........To Read More.....