THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A Victory Over ObamaCare

Congress puts a repeal bill on the President’s desk.

US Capitol and US Senate in Washington DC.
January 6, 2016

Congress returns to work this week, and for once those words shouldn’t trigger a panic attack. As early as Wednesday the House will vote to send a bill repealing most of ObamaCare to President Obama, and this may become a consequential moment, assuming Republicans are prepared to make an argument.

Some on the left and right are dismissing the move as pointless because Mr. Obama will veto the measure, and of course he will, but repeal has never before reached his desk. Since the GOP won the House in 2010, Senate Democrats have filibustered health-care improvements and shielded the President, and their obstruction has continued even after they were reduced to a minority.

Republicans are now using the special “reconciliation” procedure that allows a budget bill to pass with a simple majority—which can only be used once a year—to get around Harry Reid’s bone yard. Kvetchers on the right who say the Congress never does anything should be pleased, unless their griping was merely for political show.

This achievement is all the more notable for traveling through the regular channels of constitutional government, without Armageddon-style confrontations or blowing up century-old Senate rules, as some activists have demanded. The bill passed through patient, unglamorous legislative work, with House and Senate Republicans working together to make policy advances instead of degenerating into infighting and recriminations as usual.

This is what the GOP promised voters in 2014. Fifty-two of the 54 Senate Republicans voted for the bill, which passed 52-47 over unanimous Democratic opposition. Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois were the two GOP dissenters.

The task now is to leverage Mr. Obama’s veto to hold Democrats accountable for their votes and the consequences. Liberal spin can’t disguise that the law is failing on every level other than expanding coverage—as if anyone ever argued that a new entitlement couldn’t reduce the uninsured rate. The huge premium increases and other disruption in the health-care markets that the critics predicted explain why the law continues to be so unpopular with the public six long years after passage.

In those days the usual Beltway savants instructed Republicans to accommodate themselves to what was supposed to be a landmark of liberal governance. The GOP was wiser to maintain its resistance. Their opposition paid off politically in 2010 and 2014 and might have in 2012 if Mitt Romney hadn’t passed an ObamaCare prototype in Massachusetts. The repeal legislation shows Republicans are doing what they told voters they’d do.

Now they should talk about reform alternatives that can start to repair some of the damage, and perhaps if they offer a vision and agenda that are bold enough to set the terms of the 2016 debate they might even turn the presidential primary toward matters of more economic substance than a border wall with Mexico.

The larger import is that the vote shows that the 2016 election is all that stands between ObamaCare and history’s dust-bin—as Hillary Clinton recognizes. “They have no plan,” the candidate said at an Iowa event Monday. “The Republicans just want to undo what Democrats have fought for for decades and what President Obama got accomplished. So we need a President, just as President Obama will, to veto that. I don’t think the stakes could be higher.”

Mrs. Clinton is right to be alarmed. Congress’s successful repeal shows what Republicans might achieve in 2017, if they can earn the opportunity from voters by also winning the White House.

 

 

 

 

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