Nobody would blame you for rolling your eyes at the GOP’s failure to pass an Obamacare replacement bill last Friday.
It’s been seven long years of Republican hand-wringing over Obama’s legacy healthcare law. There have been 62 prior GOP Affordable Care Act repeal votes. And President Trump promised to repeal the law at least 68 separate times on the campaign trail.
Talk about anti-climactic. That said, healthcare reform isn’t dead.
Not according to veteran Hedgeye Healthcare policy analyst Emily Evans. “The pressure to get something done this year is important, even if it’s not major stuff, just small tweaks to the bill,” Evans says in the video above from The Macro Show.
There are two main reasons why the passage of time alone may force the GOP’s hand:
- “Come August, the primaries are going to start heating up for the 2018 elections,” Evans says. “If you’re in a safe seat you’re fine but, if there’s any chance you’ll have a primary opponent, you’re going to be a bit more careful,” and fight for a GOP healthcare bill. What Republican in his or her right mind would want to be labelled as a defender of Obamacare by their inability come up with an alternative?
- “The other pressure is that the individual market is in trouble,” Evans says. The individual market, “isn’t a big part of major insurance companies’ business… As we roll into the plan approval process this June and July you’re going to see more insurers start peeling off. You could see a significant problem where there is not health insurer in the individual market in certain counties in the United States.”
Maybe that’s why, moments after the news broke that the GOP healthcare bill failed, in an interview with the NYTimes, President Trump predicted Democrats would beg for a deal within a year, after “Obamacare explodes” because of higher premiums. As Trump said in the interview, “The best thing that could happen is exactly what happened — watch."
Time will tell.
