Keep yer guvmint hands off my Obamacare
by Tom Sullivan
Passage of the Affordable Care Act represented a breakthrough in moving the U.S. towards a health care system more for patients than insurance company profits. (There is a long way to go.) Republican efforts to undo Barack Obama’s signature legislation they themselves named Obamacare have not simply been unsuccessful, Republicans find themselves backtracking ahead of mid-term elections. Voters do not want to go back to denial of coverage for preexisting conditions.
CNN reports:
After confidently attacking the law in four consecutive elections, Republicans for the first time this year are playing defense. They are especially struggling to defend the provisions in the House-passed repeal bill, and a separate lawsuit by attorneys general and governors from 20 Republican states, to unravel the law’s requirement that insurers provide coverage, with no surcharge, to patients with preexisting health conditions. Over half of all Democratic ads in House and Senate races over roughly the past month have dealt with some aspect of the health care debate, far more than in the past, according to ad tracking by the Wesleyan Media Project. “Health care is the defining issue of the election,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who is consulting for several liberal groups on the issue, including Protect Our Care, says flatly.
Demonizing an unknown government program before the fact is one thing. Repealing it once it takes root verges on impossible. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol knows that well:
“Whichever party is on the offense on health care, is trying to change the status quo, is running a risk, because people for all their general dissatisfaction with the system, they are mostly reasonably content with their health care, and very nervous about it getting worse,” Kristol says. The Republican effort to repeal or retrench the ACA has already extended much longer than the struggle over any other modern safety net program. After Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, for instance, Alf Landon, the Republican presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing the law. But after Landon won only two states, Wendell Willkie, the GOP presidential nominee in 1940, ran on expanding Social Security. Although Congressional Republicans continued some rearguard actions against the law through the 1940s, the party never again proposed complete repeal.
Medicare and Medicaid rooted even faster. Lyndon Johnson passed health care support for the elderly and the poor in 1965. By the 1968 elections, neither Richard Nixon nor a significant number of Republicans ran on repealing them, although the party has tried to weaken or restructure them, Ronald Brownstein explains.
“The party of message discipline” simultaneously claims to support the popular coverage for preexisting conditions, tried to eliminate premium limits for people with them, wants to allow states to offer “skimpier, cheaper ‘short-term’ health insurance plans,” and wants Obamacare declared null and void:
The Texas attorney general and 19 other Republican state attorneys general are arguing in federal court that since the GOP’s tax law effectively repealed Obamacare’s mandate that all people buy insurance, it is now unconstitutional. The AGs further argue that if the mandate is unconstitutional then all of Obamacare — including the popular protections — are also unlawful.
The lawsuit has puts many Republican candidates in a bind as their states actively attempt to repeal the preexisting conditions in court while they try to convince voters of their desire to uphold those same protections.
“Republicans have never lacked for chutzpah, which is what it takes to file a lawsuit intended to take away protections for preexisting conditions, and then run a soft-focus ad about how committed you are to protecting those with preexisting conditions,” Paul Waldman wrote last month in the Washington Post.
Meantime, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports health care as one voters’ top two issues along with government corruption:
The Party of Trump would rather frighten its cultists with foreign women and children just ahead of Halloween.
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