Partisan Gridlock Thwarts Effort to Alter Health Law

From The New York Times:

Almost no law as sprawling and consequential as the Affordable Care Act has passed without changes — significant structural changes or routine tweaks known as “technical corrections” — in subsequent months and years.

But  . . .  health care providers and others seeking changes are finding, to their dismay, that in a polarized Congress, accomplishing them has become all but impossible.

Republicans simply want to see the entire law go away and will not take part in adjusting it. Democrats are petrified of reopening a politically charged law that threatens to derail careers as the Republicans once again seize on it before an election year.

As a result, a landmark law that almost everyone agrees has flaws is likely to take effect unchanged.

 

“I don’t think it can be fixed,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in an interview. “Everything is interconnected, 2,700 pages of statute, 20,000 pages of regulations so far. The only solution is to repeal it, root and branch.”

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and one of the law’s primary authors, said: “I’m not sure we’re going to get to the point where it’s time to open the bill and make some changes. Once you start, it’s Pandora’s box.”