Becoming Fluent in the Replace of “Repeal and Replace”

Despite intense public pressure, Republicans have held firm in their opposition to Obamacare after all these years. After failing to persuade even a single Republican congressman or senator to support the Affordable Care Act, Democrats made a point to tar Republicans as being cold, heartless and insensitive to the plight of uninsured Americans.

But as many of Obamacare promises have failed to deliver and the law’s unpopularity holds steady, Republicans have been exonerated for refusing to get behind a popular president supporting one of the biggest expansions of the federal government in decades.

Republicans have always had alternatives to Obamacare. But with President Obama in the White House, it became too easy for the media and the law’s supporters to dismiss GOP ideas. But now that Republicans are poised to control all three branches of government for the first time in over a decade, repealing Obamacare is no longer a pipe dream.

In fact, repealing president Obama’s signature legislative achievement is as close as a direct order from an angry electorate that ticked off frustration with the health care law as one of the most deciding factors of how they voted.

So the hard work of legislating is imminent. Some Republicans will be better prepared for the test than others. While some Republicans, including the president-elect, have put off fleshing out the details of an Obamcare replacement, others have been working diligently to provide a sound and well thought out Republican alternative. Ellen Carmichael has reported at Opportunity Lives on the efforts of Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), a former doctor leading the House effort to replace the Affordable Care Act with a patient-centered and market-driven alternative.

Sadly, there are not enough Tom Price Republicans. That means, that there are still too many that struggle to explain what an Obamacare alternative would actually look like in practice. Beyond calling for the purchase of healthcare insurance across lines and decoupling health insurance from employment (both worthy ideas), many Republicans look uncomfortable when asked what other meaningful steps can take place to insure the millions of Americans that lack health insurance. This needs to change quickly.

Republicans could do no worse than start by reading and re-reading a paper published by the Foundation for Research and Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a new free market think tank, called “Transcending Obamacare and Achieving Market-Based Universal Coverage.” Avik Roy, one of the leading intellectuals in the conservative movement, thoughtfully and persuasively lays out a series of ideas to cover the uninsured.

Roy looks to technological and online advancements to disrupt an industry that has been painfully slow to embrace change. Among Roy’s ideas include telemedicine, which would let patients have a medical check up completely online. While this idea is not entirely new, and is in fact already taking place in some places, regulatory burden has made it difficult to grow and flourish.

Another idea is medical tourism, or allowing patients to receive hospital care outside of their immediate area. Roy points to businesses in Dallas that have recently started flying their employees to neighboring Oklahoma for some medical treatments. Of course, for most employees—let alone individuals—this is prohibitively expensive. But with increased competition, largely spurred by deregulation, the cost for something like medical tourism could come down in the future much the same way purchasing a cell phone has become accessible for many individuals.

At the heart of the FREOPP paper is innovation and competition without unnecessary tax credits, mandates or cost-controls. That’s not to say that some iteration of the recommendations would not include some or all of these features, but ultimately it’s about decreasing regulations and barriers of entry as a way of spurring competition and innovation—with the hope of providing safe, low-cost and quality health coverage to those without health insurance.

Common sense ideas that could even find bipartisan support. Unless Democrats buy into some of these reforms, partisanship will prevail and only guarantee that the same scenario will play out again when the inevitable pendulum of power swing back to the opposing party.

It’s a momentous challenge, but there are plenty of ideas to make repeal-and-replace a success. What’s needed now is both the will, and the courage, from Republican policymakers to see this through.

Israel Ortega is a Senior Writer for Opportunity Lives. You can follow him on Twitter: @IzzyOrtega.