"The last line of Avik Roy’s assessment for Forbes is its most brutal. “Expanding subsidies for high earners, and cutting health coverage off from the working poor: it sounds like a left-wing caricature of mustache-twirling, top-hatted Republican fat cats,” he writes.
There are parts of the bill Roy likes — chief among them, the Medicaid reforms. But “those reforms are overshadowed by the bill’s stubborn desire to make health insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans, and trap millions more in poverty.”
Ouch.
“The critical mistake of the AHCA,” Roy argues, “is its insistence on flat, non-means-tested tax credits. The flat credit will price many poor and vulnerable people out of the health insurance market.”
The result is Republicans have proposed a reverse-Robin Hood structure: The poor get much less help than they do now, and the rich get much more. To someone like Roy who believes that conservatives are, or should be, the real champions of America’s poor, this is disastrous. It’s not just a bad idea, it’s a bad idea that discredits all their other ideas; a bad idea that confirms what liberals have always thought about them.
Making matters worse, Republicans have given up on getting any Democratic support for their reforms, which means they need to pass the bill through the narrow channel of budget reconciliation so it can’t be filibustered. But the budget reconciliation process can only absorb purely budgetary proposals. That means most of the insurance regulations Republicans wanted to repeal, or remake, are left out of the bill. Republicans are left selling insurance that must meet most of Obamacare’s standards even as they give low-income Americans much less money with which to buy it."
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/7/14841580/obamacare-american-health-care-act?utm_campaign=ezraklein&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
He's right. That is what liberals think. And for good reason.
When Reaganism was a hypothesis, it had a legitimacy. Some things worked. Some didn't. Particularly, it created a brutal reality which tilted inequality further in favour of the wealthy and left the working class overstretched.
Once the evidence is in, you have to modify the hypothesis to cure its deficiencies. But Republicans don't.
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