Now that Republicans run the government, we are seeing which set of concerns they choose to prioritize, given limited available resources. The unsurprising answer is that Republicans will make a priority of repealing substantially all the tax increases in Obamacare, most of which fall on people who make over $200,000 a year. If House Speaker Paul Ryan gets his way, people who hated Obamacare because of the taxes it imposed will get nearly everything they wanted. But much of the rest of the law would stay in place. And people who hated the law for non-tax reasons — they thought insurance premiums were too high, they didn't like being penalized for not having insurance, they didn't like cuts to Medicare — mostly wouldn't get what they were expecting.
This Obamacare repeal plan leaves out much of the wish list of the anti-Obamacare coalition. It lacks most of the deregulatory provisions that were supposed to make insurance cheaper and offset the reductions in subsidies offered to many Americans. It would likely result in millions of Americans losing health insurance. It offers no restoration of Medicare benefits to the seniors who were activated to vote Republican over Medicare cuts in the 2010 election. Yet curiously, some groups did not have to compromise: wealthy people, medical-device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, tanning salons.
