Rep. Tom Price
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the guy who thinks people getting subsidized health insurance through Obamacare are
moochers, also recognizes that it's going to be a lot harder for him to be re-elected next November if 185,000 of those people lose their health insurance. So he came up with a
plan that would keep that from happening until
after the 2016 election. A House Republican chairman, however, essentially just told Johnson to
pound sand—Johnson and some eight million people who could lose their insurance.
House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) said Thursday that he does not support an idea backed by Senate Republican leadership to temporarily extend ObamaCare subsidies if the Supreme Court cripples the law.
"I don't think that I would be able to be supportive of continuing the subsidies beyond what the court would allow," Price told The Hill. […]
Price wants to move sooner to a full Republican alternative instead of going to a temporary bridge option first.
On Wednesday, he reintroduced his Empowering Patients First Act, a plan he has also put forward in previous sessions of Congress. The bill would repeal ObamaCare and replace it with refundable, age-adjusted tax credits for buying insurance. It would give grants for high-risk pools as an insurance option for people with pre-existing conditions.
Meanwhile, Rep. Paul Ryan's
working group is still working on some kind of plan that is supposed to be the official Republican plan. There's also the uber-conservative Republican Study Group that's coming up with their "plan." So right there Price has a problem, since he's going it pretty much alone. But there's the larger problem that they all have in that there's no way they're going to get the rabble among House Republicans to agree to anything other than simple repeal. If, and it's a big if, they could manage to get something through the House, they'd have to try to get it through the Senate, where there's a whole other fight happening.
Even if—huge if—all the various and sundry Republicans with ideas can stop grandstanding and coalesce behind some idea, and the Senate overcomes Democratic opposition and passes it, and President Obama suffers from temporary amnesia and signs it into law, even if that all happens millions of people will be thrown into chaos and off of their insurance. Which Republicans don't give a damn about, at least those who don't have to worry about getting re-elected. Let's hope that Justices John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy do give a damn.