Brian Beutler — GOP’s apocalyptic new debt limit strategy: One enormous lie

With Obamacare repeal impossible, conservatives need a new villain to attack. Introducing: The "Obamacare bailout"....

This idea really morphed from a secret plot to wreck Obamacare into a Bond villain audition on Jan. 2, when, after finally discovering these dreaded risk corridors, Charles Krauthammer advised: “Attach the anti-bailout bill to the debt ceiling. That and nothing else. Dare the president to stand up and say: ‘I’m willing to let the country default in order to preserve a massive bailout for insurance companies.’”

Which is exactly what I think Republicans will do....

But for anyone reading who isn’t in the business of laying fraudulent intellectual groundwork for partisan campaigners, you can be absolutely secure in the conclusion that this is a huge scam — indeed that almost everyone who crashed the bailout rhetoric party knows they’re lying.

Why? Because they’ve since learned that Medicare Part D has a risk corridor program as well! And it’s dawning on them that they must now square their apocalyptic bailout rhetoric with the fact that some of them helped design that very entitlement a decade ago. 

Salon
GOP’s apocalyptic new debt limit strategy: One enormous lie
Brian Beutler

See also Jon Perr, Republicans Support "Bailout" for Private Medicare Insurers