House Republicans have a plan for making a plan to replace Obamacare, now with a mission statement!
Seven years they've had. Seven years and still all that House Republicans have come up with is 60-some Obamacare repeal votes and vague plans. They've done it again, releasing yet another plan to make a plan, but this time it comes with a "mission statement," and a task force! So you know just how serious they are.
Mission Statement: To modernize American health care with patient-centered solutions that improve access, choice, and quality, lower costs, promote innovation, and strengthen the safety net for the most vulnerable.
There's more. A couple hundred words more, that pretty much don't say anything beyond reiterating the vague goals they've been mouthing for seven years: give Americans choices instead of mandates, "save Medicare and Medicaid," and lots of other vague stuff that glosses over the fact that the only things they've really been able to agree on are taking away everything Obamacare has achieved, slashing Medicaid, and turning Medicare into a voucher program. None of this is new, and as Jeffery Young at Huffington Post remembers, is also not original.
But what's really notable about this opening is that it reads as though it was copied and pasted from a memo Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz wrote in 2009 to advise GOP lawmakers how to kill health care reform without making it look like they were killing health care reform.
In seven years, who even remembers how many "task forces" or plans to make a plan, they've only been able to nail down the messaging. Oh, and slashing Medicaid and Medicare—that's been easy to agree on. They don't know now to cover people with pre-existing conditions, they don't have a plan for insuring the millions of still uninsured and the millions more who would lose coverage if they gutted Obamacare. They've got words. Lots of words that all added together still provide nothing concrete.
The reality is that they can't get a plan because they can't possibly reach consensus on what it's supposed to do. They can't even reach consensus on a budget when they've got a blueprint for it—that they've already voted on and agreed to. So if you're holding your breath thinking that maybe this task force is going to do the trick, stop it.