Republicans in the Senate voted Wednesday night on a bill that would significantly accelerate the repeal of key elements of the Affordable Care Act (commonly called Obamacare) through reconciliation. As Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) has acknowledged, this will almost certainly mean that Republicans will effectively get rid of the health-care law before coming up with a replacement. On the face of it, this seems like terrible politics. If Obamacare looks like it is unraveling, insurance companies are likely to pull out quickly, potentially leaving millions of people without health insurance and leaving Republicans with the blame. It’s a very risky gamble, but one that may have a strategic logic behind it.
The Republicans are burning their bridges
GOP Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) has defended the Republican strategy as an exercise in bridge building. He told the New York Times: “The Obamacare bridge is collapsing, and we’re sending in a rescue team. . . . Then we’ll build new bridges to better health care, and finally, when these new bridges are finished, we’ll close the old bridge.” Actually, they’re burning the bridges behind them so that they have no choice but to fight. The recently deceased game theorist Thomas Schelling describes the strategy of bridge burning as follows, in his classic book “Arms and Influence”:
Often, we must maneuver into a position where we no longer have much choice left. This is the old business of burning bridges. If you are faced with an enemy who thinks you would turn and run if he kept advancing, and if the bridge is there to run across, he may keep advancing. . . . But if you burn the bridge so that you cannot retreat, and in sheer desperation there is nothing you can do but defend yourself, he has a new calculation to make.
Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff expand on this basic idea to note that bridge-burning may have two benefits. First, it unites your own forces. They have to fight because they know that there is no alternative — desertion or retreat is no longer a possibility. Second, it may cause the enemy to retreat, because they know that they face a truly determined opponent, who has no choice but to fight.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:01/12/2017