repeal? replace? repair?

When a politician talks as if he is slightly drunk, it is more often than not an attempt to hide. So, let’s not ridicule Rep. Davis’ recent radio performance at WILL, but rather try to extract some explicit promises and ask him to confirm or reject the stated position.

He explicitly says that the framework for their replacement deal is Paul Ryan’s A Better Way. We posted a short analysis of that proposal a couple of days ago; it certainly does not square with the Congressman’s stated goal to “cover the 31 millions of people who are uninsured or cannot afford to pay for the coverage because the federal government forces them to” (whatever this means).

Rep. Davis wants to make it more affordable by making it “more competitive”, as, according to him, the “lack of competition means increased prices”. It is worth repeating that the GOP proposal does not address at all the actual medical care, but only the insurance, the ways to transfer money from the population to the care providers. If  (by “more competition” or by any other means) we all pay less, there is less health care delivered, barring a reform of the medical side  – and the GOP does not aim at it at all.

Rather, their proposals – selling insurance across state lines, deregulating what they can offer and how little they can cover, etc. – are serving only the insurance companies, not the people as a whole, or medical care providers.

Rep. Davis keeps insisting that the pre-existing conditions should be covered. And he acknowledges that we need the younger population to be insured, to keep the pooling of risks – the key aspect of insurance – in place. How this is possible without a mandate, is a mystery (people would just stay uninsured until getting sicker or older, then signing up). This is the key question we need to keep asking Rodney Davis, or any apologist of A Better Way.

An attentive questioner could easily uncover the fairy-tale nature of Rep. Davis plan. The WILL’s program The 21st is, obviously, not up to the task.

But we are.