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Politics & Policy

Krauthammer’s Take: Not Repealing Obamacare Would Be ‘The Ultimate Betrayal’

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dHs6z3fPNQY

Charles Krauthammer pointed out that the complexity of health-care reform makes repealing and replacing Obamacare extremely difficult politically, but he said that Republicans have no choice because they’ve campaigned on it for years:

Not getting it done is a catastrophe because you ran against it for seven years and you promised you would do it, and that would be the ultimate betrayal of the electorate. One of the reasons of the rise of Donald Trump is because so many conservatives, so many Republicans, said they had been betrayed by their leaders. This would be the ultimate one. So it has to get done. The problem is that if you get it done, you own the entire system of American medicine. Obamacare is 2000 pages. It’s not one reform, it’s a thousand reforms, whose interactions are complex, contradictory and unpredictable, and that’s what we are stuck with now, and it’s collapsing. But if you replace, you are going to have to redo all of American medicine all over again, and then you become responsible. And politically, the danger is that you own the system. So if something goes wrong in anybody’s life — denied coverage, lousy coverage, no available doctor, premiums increasing, whatever it is — whether or not it is caused by the replacement bill, you will be responsible for it and blamed. So Republicans are going to own health care the way that Democrats did for seven years, and it almost destroyed the party if you look at all the losses in the Obama years.

NR Staff comprises members of the National Review editorial and operational teams.
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