EDITORIAL: Forget repeal or replace, Obamacare might just undergo a rebranding

Nov. 14--Less than a week after his election to the presidency, Donald Trump is already walking back some of the campaign promises that helped him win.

The wall along the U.S. southern border might turn out to be fencing along certain parts of the line between the United States and Mexico, he suggests.

The deportation force to oversee a mass exit of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants is no longer happening, per Trump.

And Trump is easing back his promise to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. "Either Obamacare will be amended or repealed and replaced," he told The Wall Street Journal last week.

As this editorial board has long noted, two of Obamacare's provisions -- allowing people to stay on their parents' health insurance until they are in their mid-20s and requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions -- will be difficult to repeal.

Other Obamacare provisions may also survive. One part of the law -- the individual mandate to purchase coverage -- provides health-insurance companies with a guaranteed customer base. Likewise, rural hospitals, including those in Alabama, are helped by the fact that Obamacare provided coverage to 22 million Americans who previously didn't have it. A wrong move by Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress could jeopardize the financial health of rural hospitals and medical practices across the United States.

One model to follow will be what Alabama did regarding Common Core, the state-by-state initiative to improve public schooling. In November 2010, Alabama's state school board adopted Common Core by a 7-2 vote. "If we do not do this, we will not be doing what I think is in the best interest of our children," Gov. Bob Riley said at the time.

The political winds for the policy quickly changed, however. Common Core was the creation of governors and educational advocates -- not the federal government. Local leaders recognized disparities between states and sought to make corrections. For example, the goal was to make sure a third-grade student transferring from, say, North Carolina to Alabama would be at the same approximate level of schooling. In large part, that's the "common" in Common Core.

Then along came a conservative political movement against anything suspected of being tied to the Obama administration. Common Core was suddenly toxic, suspected to be part of a conspiracy on the part of the federal government. It wasn't, but that hardly mattered.

The backlash was particularly strong in Alabama, so the state did a little re-branding. It largely excised the Common Core label for a new one -- Alabama College- and Career-Ready Standards. Now education leaders can, with a semi-straight face, tell Alabamians: We don't have Common Core, we have Alabama College- and Career-Ready Standards. The two are remarkably similar in their goals, but one is disconnected from a presidential administration despised by so many in Alabama.

Trump and Congress could very soon completely destroy the Affordable Care Act, taking the nation back to the inefficient patchwork system it had before. It could also follow the example of Alabama and simply keep and improve Obamacare but call it something else.

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