Republicans are between a rock and hard place when it comes to fixing Obamacare. For years Republicans ran on the campaign promise to repeal and replace the former president’s signature legislation, but with millions of people already on it, repealing and replacing is easier said than done. This reality seems to have set in for some key Republicans, who are now making fixing the Affordable Care Act their goal, rather than dismantling it and beginning anew.
But if the GOP backs out of its oft-repeated pledge to repeal and replace, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer says it will be the “ultimate betrayal of the electorate.”
“Not getting it done is a catastrophe because you ran against it for seven years and you promised you would do it, and that would be the ultimate betrayal of the electorate,” he said on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier.” “One of the reasons of the rise of Donald Trump is because so many conservatives, so many Republicans, said they had been betrayed by their leaders. This would be the ultimate one. So it has to get done.
Krauthammer went on to note that there are also dangers that come along with getting it done.
“The problem is that if you get it done, you own the entire system of American medicine. Obamacare is 2000 pages. It’s not one reform, it’s a thousand reforms, whose interactions are complex, contradictory and unpredictable, and that’s what we are stuck with now, and it’s collapsing. But if you replace, you are going to have to redo all of American medicine all over again, and then you become responsible. And politically, the danger is that you own the system. So if something goes wrong in anybody’s life — denied coverage, lousy coverage, no available doctor, premiums increasing, whatever it is — whether or not it is caused by the replacement bill, you will be responsible for it and blamed. So Republicans are going to own health care the way that Democrats did for seven years, and it almost destroyed the party if you look at all the losses in the Obama years.”
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