They say you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So House Speaker Paul Ryan did, and got damned on both the left and right—and all but ignored by his own party's presidential candidate—when he unveiled his caucus's outline for a replacement of the Affordable Care Act.
Which raises the question: How serious can this ACA alternative be? Maybe not very. The centerpiece of Ryan's proposal—tax credits for everyone who needs to purchase individual policies regardless of income—may not go far enough to prevent people from losing coverage while creating new spending that would benefit high-income earners who can already buy their own health insurance.
Ryan's plan, the health care component of the Republican's “A Better Way” agenda, hadn't even drawn a tweet from Donald Trump, and the conservative House Freedom Caucus hasn't mentioned it on its Facebook page. The libertarian Cato Institute derided it as a “bipartisan imprimatur to Obamacare's redistribution of income.” Heritage Action, the lobbying and advocacy arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, tossed some bouquets, but also called the tax credit idea a “new spending program” without any supporting notions for how it would be paid for. Some on the right have called it “Obamacare Light.”
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