I may be the least Obamacare-obsessed political reporter in the country. The issue is vastly over-reported and analyzed.
I've spent the last couple of election cycles saying the Arkansas variation, the "Private Option/Arkansas Works" plan, has had little impact on our state's legislative races. It was a furiously debated issue that barely moved a vote.
But now things are about to get interesting.
Conservatives have demanded the repeal of Obamacare ever since it passed in 2010. They are finally going to get it. The cliche to apply here is: "Be careful what you ask for."
Health care in America used to have a lot of problems. It still does. Back before 2010, a problem like rising insurance premiums could be blamed on a lot of things. Some blamed malpractice lawyers. Some blamed greedy insurance companies. Some blamed greedy doctors. Some blamed bad health habits by an increasingly sedentary U.S. population.
Since 2010, all sorts of problems -- real and imagined -- have all been called by the same name. It's all that darned Obamacare's fault, at least according to conservatives. Liberals stand guilty of their bias, too. Nothing good happened in health care without some claim that Obamacare was a major factor.
I'm beginning to think that becoming a blanket term for everything right or wrong with health care in America is Obamacare's biggest impact.
Now Donald Trump has been elected president. Republicans trounced a serious Democrat attempt to win back the U.S. Senate. They did this in a year that was very favorable for an attempted Democratic Senate takeover. Republicans held on to the House, too, and it appears that unruly chamber may even function. All this happened in an election year in which Obamacare barely came up, by the way.
So we're all set to repeal Obamacare. The problems, though, are still there. It's a good bet somebody soon will blame every one of those problems that crop up again upon -- guess what? -- the repeal of Obamacare.
Note also that after six years of demanding repeal, there's no immediate replacement plan waiting and ready. Note also that Trump wants to keep the most popular -- and expensive -- parts of the plan. These include requiring insurance companies to extend coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and allowing family plan insurance policy holders to keep kids as old as 26 on their insurance.
Chances are any repeal won't take effect immediately. After all, the last appeal that Republicans passed and the president vetoed would have left the program in place for two years.
Then there's the added factor that Republicans control many of the state capitols around the country. Those lawmakers are going to want to have some say. Then there's the lobby involved. There's a lot of cooks in the American health care sector's kitchen.
Trump got elected president by defeating a bunch of other Republican candidates who wanted to slash social spending. We'll see how bound the president-elect is to keeping that kind of commitment.
State Rep. Charlie Collins, R-Fayetteville, believes the public-private partnership exemplified by Arkansas' plan could be a model for the rest of the country. I tend to agree with him, although there are long-term affordability issues raised by the plan's opponents. Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Sulphur Springs, made the true point that a Trump administration is very likely to approve the co-pays and work requirements the state asked for and didn't get from President Barack Obama's administration.
"We have to get it right, because in 2018 I'm up for re-election again," Gov. Asa Hutchinson pithily said about health care at the recently concluded annual conference of Republican governors.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott, noted Obamacare opponent, was equally realistic but more grim. "The empire will strike back," he told the conference. "The people that make money off the existing system, the people that don't want change, they're plotting every day to try to stop what we know we have to do to turn this country around." Or, to use a less partisan interpretation, to "try to stop" the Republicans from botching this job.
There's been a great deal of argument over this law for six years. We're about to find out how much thinking has gone into it during that time -- on both sides. As desolate as the political landscape appears for them, people who wanted to fix health care now have an opening. The gridlock has kept the law frozen. The thaw has begun. We'll soon see if it's a meltdown.
Commentary on 11/26/2016