QOTD: Their dumb idea

Quote of the Day:

Of all the arguments Republicans have been waging against Obamacare as the House of Representatives prepares to vote for its repeal, none is harder to take than their criticism of the federally subsidized high-risk pools the law created to provide immediate relief to the uninsured. In May, the House Republican Conference complained that these high-risk pools would be unfair to people currently enrolled in existing state-run risk pools because the latter group was paying higher premiums. In July, the House Republican Conference complained that implementation of this unfair federal program was being delayed. By January, the House Republican leadership was grousing (in a report titled Obamacare: A Budget-Busting, Job-Killing Health Care Law) that costs for this unfair-but-wrongly-delayed program were higher than expected even as participation in this unfair-but-wrongly-delayed-but-too-costly program was lower than it should be.

Republican attacks on Obamacare's high-risk pools sound a lot like the old joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible—and such small portions! But the contradictory nature of the GOP's complaints doesn't rankle half so much as their fundamental hypocrisy. High-risk pools are, in fact, a terrible solution to the health-care crisis. But they happen to be the terrible solution Republicans most favor (along with tax breaks) whenever they're forced to state their preferred alternative to last year's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. They were the central idea in the health plan proposed by Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the 2008 election. They were the central idea in the House leadership's proposed substitute for the Democratic plan in 2009, and they played a major role in the alternative plan set forth that year by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a medical doctor who became the GOP's lead opponent to Obamacare. They were the central idea in a 2010 repeal bill introduced in May by Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif., that would have replaced the health reform bill that became law with the 2009 House leadership bill. They're absent from the current leadership repeal bill, introduced Jan. 5 by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., but only because Cantor's bill proposes no substitute at all. ...

The poor performance of Obamacare's high-risk pools aren't an argument against Obamacare. They're an argument in favor of it. High-risk pools are a Band-Aid to stanch a hemorrhage. Democrats don't kid themselves that the Band-Aid will do much to stop the bleeding, which is why they don't embrace it as a long-term solution. Republicans ought to stop pretending it can be one. - Timothy Noah