Senate Finance Committee Republicans have included repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) in their Super Committee wish list.
Some PPACA provisions have already taken effect, and more are supposed to go live in 2014 or later. Court cases involving efforts to have the U.S. Supreme Court declare PPACA to be unconstitutional now have Supreme Court docket numbers.
Meanwhile, some members of Congress are still trying to repeal the act, either by eliminating the entire act or by killing the act one section at a time.
Now Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah – the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee – and 8 colleagues are suggesting that a PPACA-ectomy would make a fine strategy for curing part of what ails the federal budget.
The “Super Committee” – the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – is supposed to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction proposals by Thanksgiving.
Budget cutters should recognize that Medicare “is on a path to fiscal insolvency, and the status quo is a policy for national bankruptcy,” the Republican lawmakers say.
Similarly, Medicaid was supposed to be the safety net for the very poorest Americans but now covers about 1 in 4, and it already consumes about 22% of state budgets, the lawmakers say.