Must-Read: Ezra Klein: The GOP Health Bill Doesn’t Know What Problem It’s Trying to Solve

Must-Read: Ezra Klein gets it right about the Republican Party and health care reform. Let us dispel with the illusion that these people have any intention of trying to keep America great, or make America greater:

Ezra Klein: The GOP Health Bill Doesn’t Know What Problem It’s Trying to Solve: After seven years of drafting a replacement plan, we get… this?…

…Have you read Sarah Kliff’s thorough look at the GOP Obamacare replacement? You have? Good. Some thoughts.

1. Little in politics shocks me. The process House Republicans want to use for their health care bill does…. Committee votes… two days after releasing it, and without a Congressional Budget Office report estimating either coverage or fiscal effects….
2. If Republicans believed the American people—or even their own legislators—would like the results of a thorough estimate of their proposal’s effects, they would have waited for one…. The GOP plan will lead to… 15 to 20 million people… los[ing] insurance…. After years of Republicans complaining that co-pays and deductibles were too high in Obamacare, co-pays and deductibles will be significantly higher…. The plan will significantly reduce taxes on the rich….
3. The deficit—it’s hard to see any short-term reduction, and if there’s a long-term reduction, it will only be due to deep, deep Medicaid cuts…. The GOP’s main idea for reducing health care costs—ending or capping the tax break for employer-provided insurance—has been left out of this legislation. There is simply no theory of cost control in this bill at all.
4. Adverse selection seems like a huge problem….
5. The plan is strikingly regressive….
6. Hypocrisy is a minor sin in politics, but still, it is remarkable how much of it there is to be found in this legislation….
7. It is difficult to say what question, or set of questions, would lead to this bill as an answer. Were voters clamoring for a bill that cut taxes on the rich, raised premiums on the old, and cut subsidies for the poor? Will Americans be happy when 15 million people lose their health insurance and many of those remaining face higher deductibles?
8. Nor are movement conservatives pleased….
9. This is much more Obamacare 2.0 than I expected….
10. All this speaks to the Republican Party’s fundamental difficulty on health care…. Suderman…. “hey don’t agree on, or in some cases even have, basic goals when it comes to health policy.”
11. Because Republicans aren’t even trying to win Democratic votes, they’re stuck designing a bill that can wiggle through the budget reconciliation process….
12. This bill has a lot of problems… more will come clear…. But the biggest problem this bill has is that it’s not clear why it exists. What does it make better? What is it even trying to achieve? Democrats wanted to cover more people and reduce long-term costs, and they had an argument for how their bill did both…. Republicans have neither. At best, you can say this bill makes every obvious health care metric a bit worse, but at least it cuts taxes on rich people? Is that really a winning argument in American politics?…
13. We’re seeing… Republicans trying desperately to come up with something that would allow them to repeal and replace Obamacare… a compromise of a compromise aimed at fulfilling that promise. But “repeal and replace” is a political slogan, not a policy goal. This is a lot of political pain to endure for a bill that won’t improve many peoples’ lives, but will badly hurt millions.