Bernie Sanders, move over. Josh Hawley would like to get to your left on health care. Hawley, Missouri’s attorney general and Republican U.S. Senate candidate, would surely dispute that characterization.
Yet Hawley’s latest explanation of how he would eliminate Obamacare while still covering people with pre-existing conditions sounds more like government-run health care than even what the socialist senator from Vermont has proposed. Hawley proposes to have the government collect people’s insurance premiums and pay their major medical costs once they’ve reached a certain threshold.
Hawley’s plan is so incoherent and apparently unworkable that it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. It has all the hallmarks of a press-release policy designed to blunt criticism that Hawley seeks, through his participation in a federal lawsuit, to tear down protections for pre-existing conditions while having nothing to replace it with. He insists he supports mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions.
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If Hawley thinks his critics are wrong, he should prove it by challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to a debate specifically on health care coverage. We suspect she’d accept gladly.
Hawley is co-plaintiff with other GOP attorneys general seeking to end Obamacare, including its popular guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. If successful, it would make millions of Americans uninsurable.
How would Hawley prevent that? For a while, he simply hid behind a stunningly cynical campaign ad claiming vaguely that he is the real health care champion, and not saying much else.
After a well-deserved national thrashing over this duplicity, Hawley last week finally outlined his answer to the pre-existing-condition conundrum. It’s a doozy.
“Insurers on the individual market would be required to offer plans to people with pre-existing conditions at the same price they do to other individuals,” Hawley wrote in a Springfield News-Leader op-ed. “The federal government would then pay for insurance costs that exceed, say, $10,000. And the insurers, in turn, would be required to give most of the premiums they collect from these patients to the government.”
Translation: The government would jump fully into the medical-insurance business, collecting premiums and paying expenses on the costliest patients. Hawley’s statement doesn’t say how this massive new federal program would be funded but implies that customer premiums would cover the cost. Either Hawley doesn’t understand the original problem here, or he’s hoping voters don’t.
Health care is arguably the top domestic policy issue of our time. It deserves better than this. Hawley and McCaskill are tentatively scheduled to debate twice more, on Oct. 18 and Oct. 25. They should ask organizers to focus one of those debates primarily on health care or call for an additional debate to focus only on that.
One phone call from Hawley to debate organizers could make this happen. If his plan is more than just a diversionary tactic, it begs for deeper public explanation and scrutiny.