This week Republicans released their preliminary version of the replacement for the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Preliminary is the key word. The debate has started. The bill still needs to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office, which will estimate the total cost over the next decade. If the CBO estimate is high, we can expect major revisions in an attempt to rein in the costs.

Democrats and conservative Republicans have both criticized the bill, which is emerging from two committees in the House of Representatives.  The bill will pass through several steps of bargaining before it is voted on in the House. The Senate will have a different version of the bill but will contain some of the same elements. The Republicans have only a three vote majority in the Senate so the bill is likely to undergo revisions if it is to make it through the higher body.

If it does pass the Senate, that po’ little bill will be exhausted, but it will then have to pass through a committee that will reconcile differences in the House and Senate versions. Finally, it will head to the White House for President Trump’s signature.

The Republican version is AHCA.  Obamacare was ACA. We’ll hear these abbreviations a lot in the coming weeks.   People with employer group insurance will see few changes.  About 11 million people pay for their own insurance under a non-group private plan. Lower income enrollees receive subsidies under Obamacare. Many complained of rapidly escalating premiums, and insurance companies have been dropping out of the market, particularly in rural areas. 14.5 million people with really low incomes were added to the insurance rolls via Medicaid expansion under Obamacare (Politifact).

Here is a brief synopsis of what is proposed so far.  Popular provisions of Obamacare will remain. Parents can keep a child on their health care policy till the child is 26. Insurers can not refuse a policy because of a pre-existing condition.

Gone are the penalties for not buying insurance. Gone is the employer mandate to provide insurance and the individual mandate to have insurance. Gone are the formulas that employers must use to determine the number of full-time employees.  Gone are the subsidies for lower income working people, gone is the tax on tanning beds and medical equipment.

Instead of government subsidies based primarily on income, tax credits will be based on age first, and will phase out slowly for individuals with incomes above $75K. The credits are refundable, so that they are available to everyone whether they pay any Federal tax or not. This is similar to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low income working families. (This provision has raised objections from the Freedom Caucus, a coalition of conservative Republicans.)

The proposed bill blocks any federal funding for Planned Parenthood, whose revenues consists mostly of Medicaid claims for non-controversial medical procedures. This provision will generate a number of discrimination lawsuits should it remain in the bill.

Medicaid funding will be based on each state’s at risk population – the elderly, the poor, the disabled. Each state can decide how to administer the funds. Several governors, including Republicans, are concerned about this provision. Under the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, hundreds of thousands of people were added onto the program. Governors worry that they will be stuck with some hard decisions in the case of a recession, when many more people lose their jobs, including their employer insurance, and qualify for Medicaid. The federal government can legally borrow money to fund promises when tax revenues are insufficient. States must run balanced budgets.

We can be sure that there will be a flurry of unsubstantiated assertions from politicians and surrogates on both sides of the aisle. We will be bombarded with catch phrases. Each politician hopes that their pithy phrase will make it into the 24 hours news cycle.

Here are just two examples from the floor of the Senate this past Tuesday. Each Senator has some good points but they drown those points in partisan drivel.  Both of these Senators are regarded as moderate voices within their party.

From John Cornyn, Texas Senator and Majority Whip, comes a phrase that all Republicans are required to use to describe Obamacare: “unmitigated disaster.”  Republicans didn’t feel that invading Iraq was an unmitigated disaster. Only Obamacare qualifies for that epithet. Republicans have learned that repeating a phrase over and over and over and over again makes it so. Politics reduced to a slogan, like the Wendy’s commercial “Where’s the beef?” (Here are a few excerpts of the speech. Cornyn’s staff doesn’t provide a full transcript.)

How much of an unmitigated disaster is Obamacare?  The Republican version keeps a number of key features of Obamacare so we can be reasonably certain that this is radical rhetoric, typical of what we hear from either party.

Cornyn uses the phrase “broken promise” to describe Obamacare. Over on the other side of the aisle, Washington Senator Patty Murray uses the same phrase to describe the Republican replacement. Maybe they both share the same speech writers.

Murray declared that millions of people will lose health care under the proposed legislation, which returns control of health care to the states. Here’s what passes for math in the Democratic Party, whose estimates of Obamacare enrollment have been  way above actual enrollment. The big  increase in enrollees have come from the Medicaid expansion, not the appeal of private market Obamacare plans.  Democrats could have passed a 100 page Medicaid expansion Act and have achieved the same results.

So, how does Murray justify the statement that millions will lose health care?    It’s not current enrollees, but future enrollees who will lose health care.  Got that?  These are invisible millions. Based on wildly optimistic estimates of future enrollments if Obamacare was left in place, Democrats then estimated that those exuberant estimates will not be met under the new proposal.  In past years, when enrollment figures did not meet projections, Democrats did not lament the fact that “millions” lost health care.  Democratic politicians only use their special math on programs from the other side.  And yes, Republicans do this as well.  (Murray’s staff made a transcript of the whole speech available.)

Like Cornyn, Murray reaches into her box of assertions, pulls out a few and repeats them. Only Obamacare can protect women’s health. 62% of white women, and 42% of all women, voted for Trump and his promise to repeal Obamacare because they wanted to damage their health? Does Murray think those women are stupid, or suicidal?  Maybe a lot of these women are the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton called them.

Like most Democrats, Murray can not understand that people resent the dictates of the Washington crowd and want more local control of their lives, even if it is only an opportunity to make their own mistakes. Politicians in Washington, those of both parties, have made a lot of mistakes. Voters in many states think that their legislatures and governors can’t do any worse.

Whenever we talk health care reform in the U.S., the discussion inevitably turns toward the single payer option, similar to the Canadian and British systems. One of the arguments against single payer systems is that the government rations care with long waiting times for appointments, particularly those for specialists, operations and hospital beds. Proponents of the U.S. system argue that the U.S. is far more responsive to the needs of patients.

Is that true? Several researchers studied {PDF} the waiting time statistics provided by governments in developed countries and found that comparisons of wait times are largely invalid. Why? Because different countries use different start times. From the paper:

“Current national waiting time statistics are of limited use for comparing health care availability among the various countries due to the differences in measurements and data collection.”

In some countries, the wait time to see a specialist might not start till the specialist makes an appointment with the patient. In other countries, the clock starts when the primary care physician writes the referral order that the patient needs to see a specialist. Some start the clock when the specialist receives the referral. Some countries distinguish between ongoing and completed care, while others don’t. The lack of consistency explains the contradictory results when comparisons of wait times are taken at face value.

After six years of stamping their feet and saying “No, no, no, no, no” like a four year old, Republicans have finally put some ideas on the table. We hope for some rational discussion of principles and likely outcomes, but, as each party has drifted to the extremes in the last two to three decades, the voices of moderation have been drowned out by impassioned pleas and slogans.  Moderation is a difficult political position to defend because it requires more than a catch phrase and a belligerent tone.

In the 24 hour media circus, politicians must posture and polemicize for the camera, for their constituents, and most importantly, for their contributors. Have your shovels ready for we shall soon be buried in the muck of debate!