According to Politico, Republicans are mounting an all-out effort to find some way to sidestep Senate filibuster rules next year and strike a death blow against Obama, probably by using the very same reconciliation process that Democrats used to pass the bill:
Whether Republicans can navigate the byzantine Senate rules successfully will set a key precedent: It will show voters exactly how they would execute a strategy to gut the health care law should they take back the White House and keep control of Congress in 2016.
Asked how deep Republicans were in planning on this front, incoming Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn deadpanned.
"Up to my neck," the Texas Republican said."
Meanwhile, the program's successes continue. Health-care spending in 2013 grew by just 2.9 percent, despite the fact that more than 10 million previously uninsured Americans gained health coverage. Many of those 10 million are people and families with pre-existing conditions who had no previous hope of obtaining affordable coverage. (Some 55 percent of the remaining uninsured live in states such as Georgia that have refused to expand Medicaid).<
In addition, private health-insurance rates are growing at historically low, single-digit rates, and ObamaCare premiums in Georgia "soared" by 3 percent for 2015. The federal deficit is also in free fall, with ObamaCare contributing to that decline just as predicted by the Congressional Budget Office. And finally, we've added 2.7 million jobs to the economy in the past year, the time frame in which the "job-killing" ObamaCare was substantially implemented.
In short, every single one of the GOP's over-the-top doomsday predictions about ObamaCare has been proved ludicrously off-base. Every. single. one.
And of course, while Republicans are plotting all kinds of serpentine ways in which to kill ObamaCare, as a party they still have no idea whatsoever of how they might go about replacing it. They are fixated on destruction, not construction. It is all they know.
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