SimpleDon
Veteran Member
They have come up with a couple of alternatives. One was submitted to the CBO to cost and it cost more than the ACA and it increased the uninsured to what it was before the ACA, much less improve on the ACA. The other one, Patient Choice by Orrin Hatch wasn't written as a bill but as a "vision" so that it didn't have to be submitted to the CBO. But its provisions are so much like the proposal that was submitted that their costs and coverages have to be the same. So, both increased the deficit. The ACA only increases the deficit in right wing fantasy world.
Both left the individual mandate to be decided by each state. Neither retained the employer mandate. Neither expanded Medicaid. The latest one, OrrinCare after Orrin Hatch, one of the three authors of the proposal, forced the coverage of pre-existing conditions, we think, but didn't limit the premiums for this coverage. Both kept the ACA provision that children could stay on their parents' policy through age 26. Both eliminate the on line exchanges (or least the funding for them.) Both get rid of the subsidies for low income families rather providing block grants to the states to finance Medicaid. Both add tax credits for low income earners. But only up to three times the poverty level, not four times like ObamaCare.
Both created a race to the bottom that violates states rights by allowing any state's plans to be sold in another state, meaning that states would compete with each other to require the lowest level of coverage possible. The same theory that gave us credit card interest rates of 25%. Both grossly overestimate the savings from tort reform, a reform that now know from numerous states enacting it that it doesn't provide anywhere near the savings that its proponents claim for it.
Both eliminate the taxes on gilt edged plans replacing it with counting the higher costs of the gilt edged plans as income and subject to the progressive nature of the income tax, the only provision where, in my opinion, they improved on the ACA. Even though it is at such a high level of cost that it doesn't collect as much as the dedicated tax in the ACA.
There is a chance now that the Republicans can instruct the CBO in future to ignore reality and to support the conservative lies about the ACA and their alternatives for it. As they have forced the CBO to adopt intertemporal, dynamic models that show tax cuts paying for themselves. (These same models also show that virtually every other use for possible government expenditures except for defense spending have an even greater return to the economy and to tax receipts than tax cuts do.)
Conservatives are always wrong about the problems that we face today.
