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October 02, 2015 at 08:20 AM
(Bloomberg View) — Is Hillary Clinton signaling a turning point in the health care debate – one in which Democrats adopt the same fiscally irresponsible position that Republicans take?
Democrats have been at a disadvantage in waging the public-opinion war because they’ve been mostly realistic about its costs. (Yes, there have been exceptions: Barack Obama’s claim that people could keep their old plans if they wanted, for example — perhaps the most egregious example of over-promising.)
This isn’t just about talking points. Democrats writing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2009 took Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimates seriously, and changed their bill to ensure it was projected to lower the federal budget.
See also: CBO: Repealing PPACA would cost $353 billion over next decade
Meanwhile, Republicans have spent the last six years attacking every funding mechanism and other cost of the law while in most cases promising that their (still unseen) alternative would somehow provide all the benefits that the reform has brought. Every Republican politician claims the conservative alternative to Obamacare will cover those with pre-existing conditions, for example, but not one of them has suggested how to pay for it.
So it was a surprise when Clinton came out this week for repeal of the “Cadillac plan tax” — the Obamacare provision that tries to cut overall health care spending by limiting the current tax advantages for gold-plated employer-linked health insurance.
As the Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn explains, the Cadillac plan tax is a provision of the law that “economists love and pretty much everybody else says they hate.” Many unions dislike it because they have bargained for excellent insurance for their members that is worth less to workers under the tax; they also don’t trust that employers, if they cut back on compensation in the form of health insurance, would make it up with increased wages. Republicans hate the tax because, well, it’s a tax. Economists like it because it promotes efficiency and fights medical cost increases.
