At the National Review, Wesley J. Smith speculates on some possible fixes to Obamacare:
If President Obama is serious about wanting to help the middle class, he will work with Republicans to refashion the law–understanding that he will never agree to a repeal–so that it is less likely to claim working stiff victims. But since he is the reincarnation of Huey Long, I suspect instead that he and his minions will demonize companies for making rational business decisions. Part of the problem, of course, is that the president doesn’t understand the concept of rational business decisions.
I assure you, the Obama administration would love it if the Republicans in Congress decided to work with them to improve Obamacare. In the construction of the bill, the GOP minority adopted a policy of absolute obstruction. That meant, weirdly, that the policy ended up being more liberal than you might have expected. Because they didn’t participate, they were not able to extract any concessions to provide the stamp of bipartisanship. And since then, they’ve passed about 579 bills to repeal it but that’s about it. If they have specific complaints, those have not been addressed except via the insistence on blanket repeal.
However, if they want to shift their focus, they can definitely play an important role: as a watchdog on the policy constructed by the majority. Since Obamacare isn’t one single bill but is a huge mass of collected bills, it is absolutely guaranteed that some of it is not perfect. If the Republicans decide to accept its basic existence and shift their role to helping police its implementation…that would be fantastic.
Now, Mr. Smith doesn’t identify any specific things to complain about. So I expect what he really means by ‘refashioning’ the bill is basically just killing it. But if other voices on the right do have specific small-bore complaints, I encourage them to represent their constituents by helping to improve this legislation that will be implemented over the next couple years!