Panic starts to set in among some Republicans over Supreme Court Obamacare decision
Joan McCarter
You can almost hear the cries of some swing district Republicans: "Doooo something! Pleeease!"
Without a plan, Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine) argued consumers would face chaos in the market if the Supreme Court rules against subsidies to buy ObamaCare on the federal marketplace."If [the subsidies] are ruled unlawful, it will be incumbent upon Congress to help create a thoughtful free market replacement for ObamaCare, and an off-ramp for the six million individuals who have in good faith purchased ObamaCare policies," Poliquin wrote in a letter to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other committee leaders.
Actually, it's probably more like 8 million than 6, but why quibble when a Republican sees impending doom and is trying to do something about it. And of course Poliquin has his own "plan" for what Republicans should do.
Under Poliquin’s proposal, individuals would no longer be required to purchase insurance and they would no longer have to purchase plans that cover the same broad range of services and procedures. To cut overall costs, his plan would require doctors to provide cost estimates of services to allow patients to "shop around" and would allow people to buy insurance across state lines—two ideas that have been widely accepted by the GOP.
So not so much a plan as a "yeah, what he said" proposal that all of them have embraced but somehow never been able to formulate into a real legislative proposal that will score well with the Congressional Budget Office and be taken seriously. Partly that's because, like all the other Republicans, he wants to keep the Obamacare requirement that insurers have to take all comers. And that, when you don't have a mandate making sure that healthy people are also buying insurance and helping to keep overall costs down, is not a workable solution. But it's something, which is more than he's got for the millions who could very shortly lose their subsidies and their insurance.
Meanwhile, one top Republican committee chair says any kind of subsidy continuation isn't going to be happening on his watch. That brilliant idea that Justices Scalia and Alito had that they could gut the law and it would be okay because Congress would fix it.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/19/1385733/-Panic-starts-to-set-in-among-some-Republicans-over-Supreme-Court-Obamacare-decision?detail=email