What Parts Of Obamacare Will Republicans Repeal?

Jason Millman explains why the medical device tax is at the top of the list:

With more than 7,000 device companies spread across the country, the industry has large concentrations of employers in California, Minnesota, Massachusetts and New York. The map [above], which shows the location of companies and employees who have signed onto a letter opposing the tax, helps explain why the issue keeps resurfacing.

How much would repealing it cost?

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the tax, which was added to the law to help pay for expanding coverage to an estimated 25 million people, will bring in $29 billion over a decade. That’s much less than other the funding sources in the law, like the tax on health insurers ($101.7 billion) or the requirement on medium-sized and large employers to offer coverage ($130 billion).

Sarah Kliff notes that opposition to the tax is bipartisan:

Nearly every industry has lobbied against its own assessment since Obamacare passed; insurers, for example, have run an extensive campaign against the health plan tax. But what might have given medical device makers an extra boost is that a decent number of Democratic senators want to see that fee gone, too. Both Minneapolis and Boston are hubs for medical device making. So it’s not especially surprising that Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Al Franken (D-MN), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) all support medical device tax repeal.

Suderman agrees the “most likely item on the list is a repeal of the law’s medical device tax.” Other brewing fights:

Republicans will try to make an issue out of the individual mandate which is widely disliked, but Obama won’t let that one get through. The employer mandate, however, might be a successful target: The administration has delayed and undercut the provision on multiple occasions, and liberal policy shops have argued that it’s not necessary.

Paul N. Van de Water criticizes another item on the Republican wish list:

House Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell called this week for a major change in health reform’s requirement that larger employers offer health coverage to employees who work 30 or more hours a week or face a penalty. Claiming that the 30-hour threshold is “an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours,” they propose raising it to 40 hours. In reality, however, that step would lead to fewer hours and more part-time work — the exact opposite of what their rhetoric about “restoring” the 40-hour work week implies. …

Only about 7 percent of employees work 30 to 34 hours (that is, at or modestly above health reform’s 30-hour threshold), but 44 percent of employees work 40 hours a week and thus would be vulnerable to cuts in their hours if the threshold rose to 40 hours. (See figure.) Under the Boehner-McConnell proposal, employers could easily cut back large numbers of employees from 40 to 39 hours so they wouldn’t have to offer them health coverage.

Chait points out that all of tweaks Republicans are advocating for would increase the deficit:

The GOP’s Obamacare conundrum in a nutshell is that they have condemned the law for its fiscal irresponsibility, but its political weakness stems precisely from its fiscal responsibility. The law made a lot of enemies because it had to make the numbers add up. Republicans have spent five years promising to get around to proposing their own plan, but they haven’t done it because if you want to make the numbers add up, you have to take things away from people.