It’s baaaaaack.
In today’s issue of The Hill, the Heritage Foundation’s “dangerous” director of economic policy Paul Winfree and I explain that King v. Burwell makes repealing ObamaCare about nine Senate votes easier:
As early as this week, the House could consider a reconciliation bill that repeals only parts of ObamaCare, leaving many of its taxes in place. Not only do more Americans oppose that approach than oppose ObamaCare itself, but the Supreme Court’s recent King v. Burwell ruling shows why a full-repeal bill is more likely to reach the president’s desk. Indeed, unlike partial repeal, Senate leaders can all but guarantee that full repeal can pass the Senate with just 51 votes…
A full-repeal bill, by contrast, would recognize that ObamaCare creates a single, integrated program of taxes and subsidies that work in concert to expand coverage, and would eliminate that entire program as a whole. Its primary effect would be budgetary. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), full repeal would eliminate $1.7 trillion of spending and “would reduce deficits during the first half of the decade.” Retaining ObamaCare’s spending cuts would ensure that repeal reduces deficits in perpetuity…
The Senate Budget Committee can further clarify that these provisions create one integrated program. First, it can ask CBO to score ObamaCare as it scored President Clinton’s essentially identical proposal in 1994, with “all payments related to health insurance policies…recorded as cash flows in the federal budget.” Second, it can adopt that score as the baseline against which the Senate considers reconciliation. Using that baseline would show ObamaCare’s regulations are merely components of a larger program, that all financial effects of repeal would be budgetary, and that Congress may repeal those regulations via reconciliation just as it can repeal rules regulating any other government spending Congress zeroes-out through that process.