Like them or not, we’re all pretty clear on what the Tea Party and the far right wing of the Republican Party stand for: opposing President Obama on everything and obstructing government.
What do Democrats stand for? Well, that depends. Democrats are fond of nuanced positions. And they’ll run like scared cats at the first sign of trouble.
It’s happened again with the Affordable Care Act. After surviving every kind of assault, from lawsuits to GOP threats of a government shutdown, the ACA is facing its worst foe: frightened Dems.
As President Obama’s poll numbers slipped following the rocky rollout of the ACA website, leading Dems began distancing themselves from the law. Many were probably emboldened by Bill Clinton. The former president, not known for his good judgment, said Obama should honor his promise: let people who like their current health insurance plans keep them even if they don’t meet the ACA’s minimum standards.
After some Dems began jumping onto a bill proposed by Senator Mary Landrieu, which basically heeds Clinton’s advice, a besieged Obama was left with few choices. He went before the public to try a little massage therapy on his broken promise, offering his own proposal: insurance companies can allow people who received cancellation letters to keep their old policies for a year.
But on Friday, a stunning 39 Democrats sided with House Republicans to pass Representative Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” While the vote was immediately labeled a damaging blow to Obama – and it was – the worst damage was inflicted on the American public.
The bill should have been called the “Keep Our Broken Health Care System Act,” because it basically resurrects the status quo. It not only allows people to keep their current plan for a year, even if it doesn’t provide good coverage, but it also allows insurers to keep selling those plans.
As frustrated as the public is with the ACA and the federal website, a recent international survey by the Commonwealth Fund is a stark reminder of just how broken the old health care system was.
The Fund’s survey of 20,000 adults in 10 industrialized countries found that Americans pay more and get less for their health care than those in the other countries. Costs are so high that more than one-third of Americans in 2013 went without the care medical professionals recommended.
And about 23 percent of Americans had serious problems paying their medical bills.
Americans notoriously have a problem with long-term memory. Economist Lawrence Summers, a former Clinton and Obama administration official, recently framed the issue this way: Obama has tackled a problem that has been an economic drag on the country for nearly 50 years. Anyone who thinks that the system was working well prior to the ACA is wrong, Summers said. Premiums were rising at an unsustainable double-digit pace for much of the last decade, he said, and the ACA is already accomplishing more than what many people expected.
Obama has said from the beginning that he expected the law to be improved over time. But changes that don’t require young people to buy insurance or that permit people to enroll in plans that are often no better than “sub prime” insurance plans do nothing to improve the ACA.
And opening the law up at this time with this Congress would practically guarantee killing it anyway.
Republicans have rushed to the airwaves to call the president a liar. And the vote on the Upton bill is certainly not an effort to improve Americans’ health care. It’s their latest attempt to derail the ACA. Who didn’t see that coming?
A reversal on the ACA by Democrats at this point is entirely different, however. To come out now and oppose the ACA is cowardly. It not only tells voters that the GOP was right all along, but it also says that Dems are more interested in their own political well-being than the nation’s. And this will haunt the party for years to come.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2013.
It should be named, ” Cover our Backsides until after the Congressional Elections Act!”
With the slow-motion disaster of Omabacare rolling out and expected to unfold over the next year and beyond, no one could blame the Republicans for following the adage: “Never interfere while your opponent is self-destructing”. Politically the Democrats are getting what they deserve, but unfortunately real damage is being done to the American people, our health care system and the US economy. Millions of Americans are being served with insurance cancellation notices as a planned consequence of Obamacare, and it is estimated that tens of millions who are employed by small business will lose their insurance when the Obamacare business mandate kicks in. Despite the promises that a. people could keep their existing health insurance plans, b. health insurance costs would go down and c. the program would not add to the national deficit, the indicators are all in the opposite direction.
The Democrats must have assumed they would forever be in control of the government to pass such a huge program without bipartisan support. Republicans, left completely out of the creation of their big-government program, were justified but unsuccessful in trying to defund and delay the disaster. There are now some Democrats actually calling for delaying the ACA – better late than never. In reaction to the passing of Obamacare the Republicans took control of the House and almost regained the Senate. They could regain all of Congress in 2014.
Support for the ACA is now at an all-time low and a CBS poll shows that 93% of Americans want Obamacare repealed or repaired. Given that public mandate, Obama and the Democrats have no alternative but to cooperate with Republicans to fix the problem they created (if possible). That may mean scrapping the ACA and starting over, keeping some of the features that people like, but moving more towards a free-market rather than a big-government solution; Allowing insurance companies to sell policies in all states, for example. They should do away with the onerous individual and business mandates in favor of economic incentives and find simpler ways to insure those who have had trouble getting health insurance instead of disrupting the entire health care system.
Obama cannot unilaterally ‘tweak’ the law anymore. (The constitutionality of all of his changes so far notwithstanding). There has already been a bipartisan vote in the House to begin fixing Obamacare, a law that lets people keep their insurance as was promised. It’s time for Obama to admit there is a problem and get on with addressing it.
Too bad “its pretty clear” what Mr. Macaluso stands for: cheering President Obama regardless of impact or effect.
The issue that the 1-year extension addresses isn’t permanently torpedoing ACA – it’s addressing millions of people that lost insurance due to timing of the law’s implementation and failure of the website enrollment processes and even paper-based signups. Something is better than nothing.
It’s a “gift” to Obama and his ACA staff to get one more year to work kinks out before again enacting the mandate to provide minimum insurance coverages, trouble-free inline enrollments, keep same insurers, doctors, etc…
ACA is herre to stay – no matter what Dems or Reps do to each other, and no matter what one-sided opinions are expressed.
Mr. Macaluso needs to lift his head from blogs of the far LEFT wing of the Democrat Party, and consider both wings when preaching on topics.