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Good afternoon, Press Pass readers. The government is shut down, but The Bulwark isn’t. Get all our shutdown coverage plus everything else we produce by upgrading to a Bulwark+ membership at the link below.
Today’s edition opens with a Republican policy mantra that once echoed through the halls of the Capitol, but that you don’t really seem to hear anymore: “repeal and replace.” During the first Donald Trump presidency, Republicans tried and failed to scrap the Affordable Care Act and come up with a new legislative basis for our country’s health care system. Doing so had been elected Republicans’ foremost policy objective since the ACA’s passage in 2010. But times have changed, and a new dynamic has emerged: Seasoned GOP legislators want nothing to do with a health care overhaul, while their younger and less-experienced colleagues appear to think they could still achieve something different, maybe greater.
For our second item, I’d like to suggest that you should value quality criticism, whether of books, albums, movies, or any other form of cultural production. Good criticism makes art better, and it creates better conversations about the art we already have. I have a great example of a great piece of criticism in this newsletter, and there are many more elsewhere if you care to look. (Our own books, arts, and culture tag is a great place to start.) All that and more, below.
The Obamacare Repeal Movement Is Dead. Long Live Obamacare Repeal.
“It’s probably gonna happen after the midterms.”
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To hear Republicans tell it, the current health care system is an abject mess that they—not Democrats—are keen on fixing.
“Let me look right into the camera and tell you clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about health care,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Monday. “Republicans are the party working around the clock to fix health care.”
Johnson’s remarks provided a rhetorical strategy for other Republicans to use as they push back on Democrats’ demands to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies, the concession they are insisting upon in exchange for helping reopen the government. They want to create the impression that Republicans intend to push broader health care legislation once the government actually reopens.
But there’s a problem. If you ask those same Republicans the logical follow-up question—will they move to repeal and replace Obamacare to fix health care?—they get a little shy. In conversations I had with several of them this week, Johnson’s GOP colleagues danced around whether they intend to pursue a comprehensive health policy overhaul. Obamacare is definitely bad, they still insisted, but their remarks often cease there, with no word on how they think it should be fixed, or if it should even be repealed.
“We need to take a look at the whole ecosystem of health care,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) told me. “The ironic part of the Affordable Care Act is it made care less affordable, so we actually have to pass something to make care more affordable, to make sure Americans have access to good, high quality care—which is what they expect—and dramatically lower costs. The system is just too expensive.”
But when asked whether Republicans would take up the cause of repeal-and-replace again, Moreno said any GOP plan would likely not come until the next Congress, and then, only so long as Republicans defend their majorities. His reasoning is that Democrats would be more likely to negotiate on a conservative health care bill if they continued to lose elections.¹
“My personal preference would be let’s do it holistically, but it’s probably gonna happen after the midterms, because right now Democrats just want to obstruct everything,” he said. “So if we can beat them pretty soundly in the midterms, we break the fever—meaning they reject the extremists in their base and they come to their senses—where you have Democrats like Joe Manchin that are here. Then you can actually make a deal with the Democrats. And I think we can make that happen. We need to. It’s a big problem.”
For years, the campaign to repeal and replace Obamacare was a Republican rally mainstay, held up as the party’s central policy offer to voters in election after election. But they never actually acted on the pledge, even when they were in a position to do so. The GOP got so used to repeatedly assuring reporters and the public that their new health care initiative was just around the corner that the claim turned into a running joke among health care reporters on the Hill.
The closest Republicans came to successfully repealing the law was in the 2017 legislation that Sen. John McCain torpedoed with his dramatic thumbs-down vote on the Senate floor. After that, it seemed that the party had resigned itself to simply moving on.
But health care broadly, and Obamacare specifically, is back in the news. Enhanced subsidies that help reduce the cost of purchasing insurance on the ACA marketplaces for around 22 million people are set to expire at the end of the year, which could more than double the cost of insurance for those affected. Senate Republicans and their counterparts in the House have expressed no interest in negotiating with Democrats to address the matter—at least not right now, in the context of a government shutdown fight.
That was the state of play until Monday afternoon, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) broke with her party. In a long, somewhat rambling post on X, Greene signaled that while she doesn’t want any illegal immigrants getting any government benefits, she is eager to address the issue of the expiring subsidies now, before her kids’ premiums jump up in the new year. (Who knows what kind of solution she has in mind? Near the end of her post, she added that “all insurance is a scam, just to be clear!”²)
I was not in Congress when all this Obamacare, “Affordable Care Act” bullshit started. I got here in 2021. As a matter of fact, the ACA made health insurance UNAFFORDABLE for my family after it was passed, with skyrocketing premiums higher than our house payment.
Let’s just say as nicely as possible, I’m not a fan.