The Obamacare “revolt” that isn’t
by David Atkins
The press is screaming with headlines that the vote by 39 Democrats to support the Upton bill constitutes some sort of anti-Obama “revolt”. That’s not, in fact, the case. There is no “revolt.”
Here’s what happened:
1) The President promised that people would be able to keep the healthcare they have. Nothing in the ACA at the time it was passed banned plans in effect at the time. In that sense, the President’s promise was going to be upheld as far as he knew.
2) Insurers then proceeded to sell a bunch of temporary plans that they knew would be subject to elimination under the ACA due to inadequate coverage. The Right then hyped up that people would “lose” those plans–even though only 3% of Americans are covered by them, even though they’re terrible plans, and even though they were only created after the ACA’s passage.
3) Rather than defending his stance and the validity of his promise by attacking the insurers themselves, the President proceeded to offer rationalizations and then an apology, and then a reversal of ground by stating that he would, in fact, tell insurers that they would be allowed to continue to sell those plans for at least another year.
4) In the Democratic-controlled Senate, Mary Landrieu offered a bill allowing insurers to continue to sell their existing plans for another year to customers who already have them while forcing insurers to inform customers of other offers through the exchanges. This jibed with what the President seems to want as well.
5) In the Republican House, the Landrieu bill had no chance of coming to the floor. Instead, House Dems were faced with an up-or-down vote on the Upton bill, which allows insurers to sell the cheap garbage plans not only to existing customers but new customers as well, without informing customers of exchange alternatives. Upton’s bill is much worse than Landrieu’s, but House Democrats’ only alternative was to vote for no fix at all, and thus position themselves as refusing to fulfill the “keep your insurance” promise even though the President himself had reversed ground.
6) Happily, the Upton bill stood no chance of passage in the Senate, or of being signed by the President. The President can make the fix through Executive power alone, so if anything crosses his desk for signature, it will look far more like Landrieu than Upton regardless.
7) Given the impossibility of that vote, Democratic House leadership released the most endangered Democrats to vote for the Upton bill, knowing full well that the vote would protect them from the worst Republican demagoguing, while shoring up the President’s own misguided desire to fulfill his promise and causing no real ill effects in terms of final policy.
Does that sound like a “revolt”? No, it doesn’t. It’s actually pretty basic, boring politics. But to the breathless, sensationalist and nuance-free press, it’s red meat aplenty with which to deceive readers about “divided Democrats.”
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