Barreling ahead in its efforts to take over Congress, the right is armed for bear. More to the point, it wants to destroy anything which suggests progress. Environmental legislation must go. Health care must go, even if, as the Times report spells out, they can only "chip away" at it.
... For starters, Republicans say they will try to withhold money that federal officials need to administer and enforce the law. They know that even if they managed to pass a wholesale repeal, Mr. Obama would veto it.
“They’ll get not one dime from us,” the House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, told The Cincinnati Enquirer recently. “Not a dime. There is no fixing this.”
Republicans also intend to go after specific provisions. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a senior Republican on the Finance Committee, has introduced a bill that would eliminate a linchpin of the new law: a requirement for many employers to offer insurance to employees or pay a tax penalty. Many Republicans also want to repeal the law’s requirement for most Americans to obtain health insurance.
Alternatively, Republicans say, they will try to prevent aggressive enforcement of the requirements by limiting money available to the Internal Revenue Service, which would collect the tax penalties.
Republicans say they will also try to scale back the expansion of Medicaid ...
And so on, marching towards Medicare.
The Times also notes that, realistically, the Republicans will find it very difficult to be as draconian as they would like to be. If they win as many seats as they believe they'll win in November...
The moment a win seems most likely is when many of us start to question that assumption.
