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Wednesday, August 03, 2016

John Kennedy's unusual homeopathic remedy

At a Senate candidates' forum today, John Kennedy offered an unusual health care alternative.
Kennedy said he thinks the best days for the U.S. are ahead.

"But not if we keep doing the same thing we have been doing for the past eight years," he said. "I would rather drink weed killer than support Obamacare."
OK well that's nice. Meanwhile the Democratic candidates are said in this article to favor "fixing" rather than repealing Obamacare. But they don't tell us anything about what fixing it means.

We're probably  not going to "repeal and replace" the ACA any time soon. But it will have to be revised in order for it to remain tenable. This could mean revisiting the so called "public option" so many of us wanted to see in the original legislation.
“Public programs like Medicare often deliver care more cost-effectively by curtailing administrative overhead and securing better prices from providers,” Obama writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“The public plan did not make it into the final legislation. Now, based on experience with the ACA, I think Congress should revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited,” writes the president.

The new embrace from the president also comes amid what appears to be a concerted push by the Democratic Party to rally around the public option.

It’s a shift that reflects how the party has tilted leftward during the Obama years.

Hillary Clinton emphasized a public option in an announcement Saturday that was interpreted as a play for supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who ran a surprisingly strong campaign against her for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders has pushed even further for a government-run, “single-payer” system.
When the next fight over Obamacare reaches the Senate, this will be a key part of the argument. It would be nice to hear more from our Democratic candidates about where they might stand. Otherwise they're offering about as much substance as Kennedy is.

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