Viewpoints: Both Parties Just Need To Stop Playing Games And Find A Consensus On Health Care; Democrats’ Bill Calls For Important Changes, Not Radical Ones

Los Angeles Times: Healthcare Isn't A Game. Both Parties Need To Stop Playing Political Football With It
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters, “The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of healthcare.” And on Wednesday he declared, “If the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we'll have a plan that is far better than Obamacare.” Those promises, however, merely echoed the empty statements Trump made during the 2016 campaign, when he pledged to replace the healthcare law with “something great” — and, as we learned, imaginary. (3/28)

Bloomberg: Health Care: Bolstering Obamacare Is Smart Priority For Democrats 
Even before this week brought news of fresh Justice Department efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act, the health-care law was already in dire need of reinforcement. Congress weakened it more than a year ago by withdrawing the tax penalty for Americans who go without health insurance. And the White House has inflicted a series of further wounds, from making it harder for people to learn about and enroll in Obamacare plans to enabling junk health insurance to be sold in place of good-quality coverage. The ACA remains under fierce assault. And that is all the more reason to welcome a new effort by Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives to buttress the law. (3/27)

The Washington Post: Republicans Can’t Destroy The Safety Net. So They’re Making It An Instrument Of Misery.
In many ways, America gets more liberal all the time. While you can see it vividly on issues such as marriage equality where rapid change is obvious to just about everyone, it can also come up in surprising ways. That’s what Republicans confronted in 2017 when they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and discovered to their chagrin that Medicaid is a hugely popular program. Everyone knew seniors love their Medicare, but they figured that drastic cuts to Medicaid would be much less likely to spur a backlash, particularly since its recipients are low-income Americans with little power. (Paul Waldman, 3/27)

USA Today: Trump Claims 'Party Of Great Health Care,' But Republicans Have No Plan
While President Donald Trump prattled Wednesday about some forthcoming, unspecified offering that would be “far better than Obamacare” and make the GOP "the party of great health care," he has no such plan. Such a plan has never existed for one simple reason: The ACA largely is that plan. Its basic architecture was devised in the 1990s as a conservative alternative to the proposals of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Later, it would be put into practice by Republican Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, and appropriated by Democrat Barack Obama when he was a presidential candidate. (3/27)

The Washington Post: Trump’s New Attempt To Undo Obamacare Is Senseless
President Trump humiliated the Justice Department this week, not with something he tweeted but in a move that could be far more consequential. According to Politico, the White House ordered the department to change its position on a major anti-Obamacare lawsuit — from weird to truly wacky — despite opposition from Attorney General William P. Barr. Indeed, Mr. Barr should be embarrassed: The legal reasoning at work in the decision is poor, and the erosion of Justice Department norms is worrying. (3/27)

The New York Times: Why Trump’s New Push To Kill Obamacare Is So Alarming
Attorney General William Barr was supposed to be a voice of reason in the Trump administration. An old Washington hand, he had the stature and the backbone to protect the Justice Department from a White House that often seems to disdain the rule of law. Turns out it isn’t so. In a stunning two-sentence letter to a federal appeals court, the Justice Department announced on Monday that it would now seek the invalidation of the entire Affordable Care Act — every last one of its thousands of provisions. (Nicholas Bagley, 3/27)

The Washington Post: Republicans Furious With Trump For Making It Harder To Lie About Health Care 
As we’ve been discussing here, the Trump administration has fully embraced a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Affordable Care Act entirely based on a legal theory that is being widely dismissed by commentators across the spectrum as nothing but a bad joke. The problem is that a Texas judge has decided that this joke is good law, and has struck down the entire ACA as unconstitutional, using logic that is bafflingly difficult to follow. That’s up on appeal, however, and no doubt many Republicans have quietly been hoping against hope that the lawsuit — which was brought by a group of Republican attorneys general — ultimately fails. Yet the Trump administration embraced the lawsuit. (Greg Sargent, 3/27)

The Wall Street Journal: Medicare For All Means Hope For None
Medicare, as President Lyndon B. Johnson put it, is a “light of hope” for elderly Americans. Medicare for All proposals threaten to extinguish it. Medicare for All would break a sacred promise and harm seniors’ access to care by forcing a system designed to support them to take on every other American. They deserve a system that helps them get well, not get in line. As for your taxes, the question isn’t whether Medicare for All would raise them, but by how many tens of trillions. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Emory University’s Kenneth Thorpe calculate 10-year price tags of $32.6 trillion and $24.7 trillion, respectively. (Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Seema Verma, 3/27)