GOP must avoid Dems’ mistakes when replacing ObamaCare

Republicans have every right to feel giddy. After all, the American electorate has spoken and voted for change. Yes, Democrats will argue Republicans lost the popular vote, but in the end this does little to hide the reality of a completely decimated Democratic Party that is struggling for relevancy in the age of President-elect Donald Trump.

Republicans are eager to enact bold conservative policy while undoing many of President Obama’s executive orders and legislative accomplishments with their majorities in Congress. Atop the list is repealing ObamaCare — Obama’s signature legislative achievement — that has failed to live up to its lofty expectations of delivering affordable and quality health insurance to all.

The base is clamoring to repeal the law while worrying about replacing it with something else later. Centrist Republicans are urging caution. And the president-elect is somewhere in the middle.

With so much at stake, Republicans would do well by looking back at history and learning from Democrats on not what to do as they confront the perils of governing. That’s because the current script is not unlike what Democrats found themselves in shortly after Obama was sworn into office.

In that case, it was Democrats that had firm control of Congress and the Republican Party was the one on life support.

Eager to placate the base, the Democratic Party steamrolled their ill-conceived health insurance plan with absolutely zero Republican support. Rather than work with the opposition party to include some of their ideas in the final bill, Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress used their majorities in Congress to enact one of the most sweeping pieces of legislation in our republic’s history.

As a result, Democrats owned ObamaCare; Republicans did not. And when ObamaCare inevitably began unraveling, Republicans were in the clear to attack a law an unpopular law they did not support.

This matters because when we look back at other consequential pieces of legislation that have been passed and enacted by previous Congresses, one would be hard pressed to find many examples of laws that did not include bipartisan support. Think of the creation of Social Security and the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

{mosads}Savvy Democrats probably knew this when passing ObamaCare, but proceeded anyway, drunk with power.

Today, it’s Republicans who have a chance to flip the script and avoid the same political fallout Democrats experienced by supporting an unpopular and flawed law. To succeed, Republicans need to do the heavy lifting of crafting a replacement plan that will gain some Democratic support.

Hardliners will scoff at the suggestion, but a more sober approach will reveal that there are replacement ideas that may attract the support of a number of Democrats, particularly those that are facing reelection in 2018 in red states that voted for the president-elect by a large margin. Look to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), for example, who said recently that “If it makes sense, I think there’ll be a lot of Democrats who would be for it [an ObamaCare replacement].”

Yes, the most recent procedural vote in the Senate to undo much of ObamaCare dampens expectations of a bipartisan overhaul, but with Republicans in the House still uniting under a single plan, there is time for Democratic support as the contours of a replacement bill begin to take hold.

Republicans are not without ideas. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican leadership have laid out a number of detailed policy plans that would do much to truly create patient-centered health care reform.

From expanding Health Saving Accounts (HSAs) to making it easier to buy health insurance across state lines, Republicans are pushing to devolve much of the responsibility of insuring the uninsured to the states. Central planners may not like this, but it’s a reasonable alternative after six years of doing it the other way.

Low-hanging fruit is undoing the individual and employer mandate and loosening age restrictions in the individual market place. Heavier lifts will include creating high-risk insurance pools to cover those with preexisting conditions. Ideas are not in shortage. What’s lacking is the political will to do the heavy lifting of legislating.

Republicans can avoid the fate of Democrats by crafting a replacement plan that will be too good to turn down.

Israel Ortega is a nationally recognized political commentator and a senior writer for Opportunity Lives, where he focuses on immigration, education and other policy areas. He is a frequent guest on Telemundo and Univision. Follow him on Twitter @IzzyOrtega.

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