It’s constitutional – deal with it
Greg Abbott on Monday urged his fellow Republicans not to “rescue” President Barack Obama’s signature health care law if it is torpedoed by the U.S. Supreme Court, an unusually public stance that could make the first-term Texas governor a leading voice on a national issue dividing the GOP.
Abbott’s position, announced in an opinion article published on the conservative National Review magazine’s website ahead of an expected high court decision, puts him in a group, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, that hopes a ruling against the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies to help poor residents buy health insurance ultimately would undo the entire law. Others, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, say the government should patch the problem by replacing the subsidies for the nearly 1 million Texans and 5 million other Americans now receiving them, at least temporarily and with some changes to the law.
Abbott’s piece also suggested what he intends to do if the justices throw out the subsidies and Congress fails to replace them: nothing.
“Now is not the time to throw Obamacare a lifeline,” Abbott wrote, “it is time to sound its death knell.”
Now is apparently the time to make sure that everyone who didn’t have insurance before the passage of the Affordable Care Act goes back to not having insurance if the Supreme Court strikes down the subsidies. Because that’s how we keep score in this state. Abbott’s article was typically full of the usual lies and distortions about Obamacare, which the Chron story to its credit points out. It also includes the same warmed-over Republican proposals for increasing health care access that Abbott would totally push for if only his party had any control in Texas. Oh, wait.
This is usually the place where liberal/Democratic types like me bemoan low turnout and lost opportunities and the like. I am instead going to point out that groups like the Texas Association of Business and the Texas Medical Association, both of which support the full implementation of Obamacare via Medicaid expansion and also supported Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign, have a role in this as well. Yes, yes, I know – Wendy Davis was a lousy candidate, the Democratic Party in this state is feckless and impotent, there’s no point for these groups in supporting someone who can’t win, blah blah blah. These things may be true, but they’re also self-fulfilling. TAB and TMA supported Abbott for their own reasons – tax cuts and tort “reform”, to be specific – but there are plenty of other things they support that they aren’t ever going to get from him or his partymates. At some point they need to decide when doing the same thing and hoping for a different result starts to become more crazy than it’s worth to them.
UPDATE: Sorry (not sorry), Greg.