Republicans bleed slow-moving ObamaCare: Column

• The House of Representatives continued a back door approach that could slow the law%27s implementation.
• Republicans aim to bleed it to death.
• Will this strategy work%3F It%27s doubtful%2C considering how far ObamaCare has come already.

In 2012, opponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) lost both at the Supreme Court and the ballot box. As a result, many opponents vowed to engage in scorched-earth tactics defunding the law or shutting down government. Last week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., announced where he stood with the release of a budget proposal he says would repeal ObamaCare.

The week before, however, the House of Representatives continued another approach, a back door that could slow or undermine the law's implementation with small cuts unlikely to spark a confrontation. The House passed a continuing resolution intended to keep the government running through September. Many conservatives balked because the measure's funding for health care reform looks like a win for President Obama. However that's not the whole story.

Small cuts

The House bill left out nearly a billion dollars in funding for insurance exchanges as well as funds for the IRS to prepare to enforce the law's tax rules. According to Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., this will delay "implementation of the Affordable Care Act. ... Without IT infrastructure to process enrollment and payments, verify eligibility and establish call centers, health insurance for millions of Americans would be delayed."

Instead of repealing ObamaCare, an unlikely event with a Democratic Senate, Republicans aim to bleed it to death. The move fits with a pattern the GOP has followed since the law passed in 2010.

Even as Republicans fail over and over again in high-profile efforts to simply destroy ObamaCare, they are succeeding with delaying tactics that may combine to turn the law's implementation into a fiasco.

Over half of the states have decided to let the federal government take charge of the ACA's state-based health care exchanges. This means the federal government is responsible for implementing 26 different exchanges by January 2014, something it has been unsuccessfully scrambling to prepare for.

Repeated attacks

Before the House denied the IRS funding for ObamaCare, Republicans had also cut back its budget in 2011 and 2012 so the agency's ability to shift resources to spend on preparing for ObamaCare is even more constrained. There have been cuts in other agencies as well.

Even delays that don't damage ObamaCare could give Republicans time to make more small cuts or even destroy it altogether. While the mandate forcing individuals to buy health insurance survived the Supreme Court, there is another mandate that requires all health plans to cover contraception, abortifacients and sterilizations. If this case reaches the Supreme Court and the mandate is overturned, Obama's signature accomplishment would suffer another blow.

And the more chaos that can be sown in ObamaCare's early days, the more Republicans during the 2014 elections can tell voters that they were right all along.

Will this strategy work? It's doubtful, considering how far ObamaCare has come already. But the more difficult things get for the bureaucrats implementing the law, the more likely Republicans will get their chance to replace it. Let's hope they have a well-thought-out alternative when that day comes.

Kavon Nikrad is founder of Race42016.com and 2011-2012 policy fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

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