Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

There's a reason Paul Ryan kept falsely saying ACA is collapsing.

Years of lies have left them trapped: [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/03/28/trumps-rage-over-his-health-care-fiasco-could-hurt-his-own-voters-heres-how/?utm_term=.924c38ac07d5 ] If you are able to read . .go read the entire fact filled article, thank You

The rub of the matter, as the Times story reports, is that GOP strategists fear that Republicans cannot be seen helping the law succeed. It’s not hard to see why. Shoring up the exchanges would amount to helping the law remain in place, after seven years in which one of the party’s touchstones was absolute rhetorical devotion to the law’s total and immediate destruction. It would also amount to a tacit admission that the law is not inherently or inevitably destined to implode. It would be a concession that the law can be made to work if Republican officials want to participate in making that happen.

Many Republicans are politically locked in a place where such a concession is unthinkable. This is why Trump continues to rage at the law as an ongoing disaster. It’s why he and other Republicans continue robotically repeating that its extinction is imminent, despite the fact that the catastrophic failure of their replacement effort has revealed them to have no alternative to it.

This ideological prison of sorts requires unwavering fealty to a future in which the ACA has collapsed and vanished from American life. Which means that, absent a revived repeal push, there could be more pressure on Trump and Republicans to refrain from participating in fixes to the law or, worse, more pressure on them to sabotage it. As Michael Hiltzik explains, the Trump administration has sent mixed signals as to what it will do on this front, but sabotage is clearly an option, and there are many tools it has to destabilize the individual markets.

But here yet another problem intrudes: Such a course of action could end up hurting a lot of Republican and Trump voters. By encouraging insurers to exit the marketplaces, it could leave many of the 12 million people who have obtained coverage on the individual markets with no remaining options — no way to get coverage or to access subsidies to cover that coverage. And Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tells me that this would hurt marketplaces in all regions of the country, which means deep red Trump territory, too, particularly because some of that includes rural areas where there are fewer insurers.

“Trump country tends to be areas where there’s less competition,” Levitt says.

This humanitarian impact would give Democrats an opening to propose their own fixes or even more ambitious long-term reforms. As Brian Beutler points out, Democrats can not only attack Republicans for “abdicating their obligation to faithfully execute the law” in the interests of the American people; they can also “point to solutions Republicans are intentionally shunning.” We don’t know how much the prospective human toll of inaction or outright sabotage will weigh on Trump and Republicans. But you’d think it would matter, at least to some degree.