View: GOP is making Obamacare harder to repeal

I’m not arguing that Republicans now have an obligation to fix the bloated mess they’ve inherited from the Democrats; if they think that they can fatally damage a bad program, they have every right to do just that. What I am arguing is that weakening the employer mandate is not going to get them any closer to repealing Obamacare. Indeed, the reverse is true. If they actually succeeded in getting this bill passed into law, all they would do is further entrench the 2010 health-care bill.

After all, a weaker employer mandate will push more people onto the exchanges. Many of those people would be receiving subsidies. The more people who receive subsidies, the harder repeal of the whole law will be. And since the exchanges, and the associated regulations, are the law’s most problematic part, it’s hard to see why Republicans want to push more people into that part of the system, and hasten the sclerosis that makes programs so hard to kill or change once they have accumulated a lot of users. We haven’t even discussed the extra cost of providing subsidies to millions more people.

Republicans seem to like taking votes against Obamacare so much that they’ll vote for anything that undoes what Democrats put in place–even if that thing costs a bunch of money, and takes them further from their stated goal of repealing the whole bill. They need a better hobby. Might I suggest they take up finding a viable replacement instead?