The Far Right Starts Another Phony Fight
Jennifer Rubin takes Eric Erickson to task for RINO labeling because according to Jennifer it’s not just the visible wingnuts — even the mainstream GOP is thoroughly out of step with the US public on the ACA.
For some time, the right-wing has been trying to paint mainstream Republicans as amenable to keeping Obamacare. No, really. They suggest the John Boehners and Mitch McConnells of the political world would be content to keep the health-care law, maybe just fiddle around the edges. (One of those accused of such treachery, Doug Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, says that is hogwash: “Nobody has written, researched, testified, or
whined more about … ObamaCare than me.”) The far right accused opponents of the shutdown as, in effect, voting for Obamacare. This is all poppycock, but it’s worth asking what the hard-liners are up to.
As a starting point, every GOP congressman and senator has voted multiple times to get rid of Obamacare, defund it, eliminate the individual mandate as a way of gutting it, stall it or offer “outs” from the mandate to, again, undermine the exchanges. It’s a ruse, a sneaky way of “accommodating” Obamacare, I guess. Moreover, if you look at all the Republican proposals for replacing Obamacare, they focus on creating patient-centered health care, eliminating the individual mandate and removing a minimum definition of “insurance.” This is true of everyone from Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). There is no “Obamacare lite” anywhere to be seen. These and other conservatives (including every single House member in two budget votes) want to limit increases in Medicaid, block grant it and let the states experiment with various cost-effective methods for providing health care to the poor.