GOP senators have been asked to make a big leap of faith, urged by their leadership to vote for health care legislation that they know is unworkable, on the promise that it’ll be cleaned up later.
That’s the gist of the “skinny repeal’’ bill that may come to a vote in the Senate on Friday. Lawmakers on Thursday night were still hammering out the exact details of what a skinny repeal would involve, but it will probably include scrapping the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act without replacing it.
That’s a really bad idea, as insurers and a bipartisan group of governors, including Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, have pointed out. Simply eliminating the individual mandate, but leaving in place the requirement that insurers cover preexisting conditions, might be just enough to satisfy the GOP’s political need to do something it can spin as a “repeal’’ of Obamacare. But as a policy, it’s a recipe for chaos and rising premiums.
The actual content of the bill, though, doesn’t seem to be relevant to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and his allies. Backers aren’t even pretending that the legislation is good policy — it’s just a way to keep the process alive for another day, after a series of defeats earlier this week. “What a skinny repeal does is, it gets it to a conference committee,’’ said Republican Senator Mike Rounds.
Under normal circumstances, a conference committee would let House and Senate negotiators reconcile their differences and produce a new bill. Senators would then have another shot at final approval. That might be enough to convince wavering senators to buckle to pressure to pass the skinny repeal.
But it’s an awfully dangerous bet, and it would be a mistake for senators to go along with a ploy that could easily backfire. The House could turn around and pass the Senate bill verbatim, meaning there would be no conference committee and no second chance. In a measure of how farcical the debate had become late Thursday, a group of GOP senators was demanding assurances that if they voted for the skinny repeal, it wouldn’t become law.
Even if the senators get assurances from the House that there will be a conference committee, though, they won’t have much influence, since House negotiators will always have the threat of voting on the Senate bill in their back pocket.
The better option would be to handle health care legislation through normal order, with ordinary committee hearings. After all, that’s the way Congress is supposed to work. Voting for a bill that senators don’t actually support, just to get it out of their hair, would be a dangerous move. And it would be a cynical abdication of their responsibility to legislate in good faith.
