Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the White House knows it can’t bring Republicans around on the health care law. The GOP base doesn’t really know what the law is, but they know they hate it, and until that fact changes, the Republicans will want to repeal the whole thing.
If that’s the case then you might wonder why Obama’s bothering to extend olive branches like this one to the GOP when he knows it’ll be swatted away.
Plausibly, it’s to turn the public debate in their direction. For example, here’s libertarian Peter Suderman’s take on this opt-out plan:
the supposed flexibility the opt-out provision gives the states to innovate is fairly limited. Theoretically, they can get out of the mandate. But to do so, they have to submit a proposal that is judged to cover the same number of people, for the same cost (or less), with the same benefit and coverage levels as mandated in the law. That will make it easier for states–like Sen. Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont–to experiment with, say, single payer at the state level. But the high bar for coverage set by ObamaCare means that proposals that would rely on higher levels of cost-sharing, on increased use of catastrophic insurance, on allowing consumers to choose what benefits they actually want to pay for are less likely to pass muster.
See I read that and think, “so this opt-out plan is useless if what you want to do is provide crappy benefits to the people in your state.” And you can see why the Obama administration might feel more comfortable on this terrain.
But this is not how Republican politicians argue. At this point all efforts to cover all people with comprehensive coverage are some form or another of “Obamacare” and that’s all that really matters vis-a-vis the public political debate.
