Here's something I thought I'd never say: Senator Ron Johnson has a great idea.
In the event that the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare subsidies in states that did not establish their own health insurance exchanges, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) wants to pass a temporary extension of the law and make the 2016 election a referendum on whether or not we should completely fuck ourselves.
I think that's a great idea, but not for the same reason that Johnson thinks it's a great idea.
Johnson’s plan would allow people to keep their ObamaCare plans and their subsidies until August 2017. That is intended to give time for a Republican president to take office, allowing for ObamaCare to be fully repealed and replaced with a GOP alternative.
“We must set up the 2016 presidential election as a contest between health-care decisions made by Washington politicians and bureaucrats and reforms that put patients back in charge,” Johnson wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week previewing his proposal.
Americans already held a vote of confidence in Obamacare in 2012 when Mitt Romney and the Republicans ran on a platform of repealing it and that was before the exchanges came online and drastically reduced the national rate of uninsured. That was before the expansion of Medicaid.
King v. Burwell is not directly tied to the expansion of Medicaid or many other aspects of the Affordable Care Act, but Republicans are not running on a platform of just ending subsidies; they're running on a platform of full repeal of Obamacare.
I have no doubt that the candidate who runs against Obamacare in 2016 will lose.