Back in 2006, Democrats ran on reforming the health care system because that was Americans’ top domestic priority. Premiums were skyrocketing and costs were rising at a rapid pace. More than 15% of the country had no insurance and the number was rising. Other people had limits on benefits that left them destitute when they encountered serious illnesses or injuries. Democrats won that year in a landslide, taking control of both the House and Senate.
Two years later, Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made health care reform the centerpiece of the nominating process. They had a series of debates that focused, in large part, on their different visions for changing the system to make insurance more affordable, expand access to care, and control costs. Again, Democrats won in a landslide.
Americans were clearly not happy with their health care system, but the Great Recession changed their priorities. Instead of worrying about losing their health care, people were worried about losing their jobs and their houses. Still, Obama went ahead with his pledge to reform the health care system—and paid a steep political price.
Six years later, the Affordable Care Act is still not popular, but there’s no evidence that it’s any less popular than the system we had before. Today, fewer than 9% of the country lacks health coverage and, despite the gnashing of teeth over premium increases, they are still 20% lower than predicted in 2009, the year before the Affordable Care Act was passed.
Most people want Obamacare reformed, not repealed. Republicans in Congress, though, have been promising their base that they would repeal Obamacare as soon as they got power. Now, it’s time for them to put up or shut up and the repeal suddenly doesn’t look so good.
Full repeal will kick millions of people off their insurance and drop more from Medicaid rolls. It will re-open the infamous “doughnut hole,” increasing the cost of prescription drugs for millions of seniors. The deficit will skyrocket, pre-existing conditions will return, and people will suddenly find lifetime limits on their insurance. Republican governors who expanded Medicaid are asking Congress not to repeal that part of it because they’ve seen the benefits.
The GOP could have pledged to fix the system, but instead, they’ve been telling America that Obamacare is a disaster that’s harming our economy and causing premiums to skyrocket. Come hell or high water, they’re going to repeal Obamacare. And the whole country is going to feel the pain.
In North Carolina, repeal will cause more than 500,000 people to lose their coverage. Another 75,000 or so stand to lose their jobs. The state refused to expand Medicaid, leaving an additional 500,000 or so people without coverage.
Last week, Governor Roy Cooper pledged to expand Medicaid and filed the paperwork with the Department of Health and Human Services to get it done. The GOP-controlled legislature says Cooper’s move is illegal since they passed a law in 2013 taking that power away from the governor. The fight will end up in court but even if Cooper loses that battle, he’s set the terms of the debate. Republicans in North Carolina want to deny health coverage to 500,000 citizens while the GOP in Washington is stripping it away from millions more across the country. Chances are, Cooper is on the winning side of that argument.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
People forget that Obamacare was invented by the right-wing Heritage Foundation as the alternative to Hillarycare back in the ’90’s. Their primary goal was to preserve Wall Street profits in the health care sector, and to prevent a government-run single payer system that would run like a utility and not produce any profits for them.
Republicans advocating for this type of system included Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. It was first passed at the state level by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, where it was known as Romneycare.
The Republicans don’t have an alternative to Obamacare, because IT IS AND WAS their alternative to a government-run single-payer system like they have in the rest of the civilized world.
One wonders why Democrats have abandoned the very popular idea of a universal health care system, especially when they had control of the government when Obama was first elected, and made the conscious decision to adopt the Republican Health Insurance reform alternative to the actual health care reform that was needed.
What a total PR disaster.
Yes, it was the GOP plan, which they then voted against after having added a few wrinkles that made it even less effective. To call them hypocrites is an understatement. As for the PR disaster, there was and is a lot of blame to go around. Right now, I worry more about what is going to happen to all the people losing their health care insurance, and the impact on hospitals and doctors. I don’t think it is exaggerated to say that some will die. Very hard to comprehend why that does not matter to Paul Ryan & Co. My personal cure for this Congressional indifference is to remove all health insurance benefits from all House and Senate members at the same time that the ACA is repealed. Let them shop on the open market!
Paul Ryan worships at the altar of Ayn Rand, and seriously believes the wingnut dogma that Americans are lazy bums overly dependent on government entitlements. That was the entire reason he went into politics, he’s often said.
It is not accurate to say that “Obamacare was invented by the right-wing Heritage Foundation as the alternative to Hillarycare back in the ’90’s.” The basic idea of Obamacare was the very same as for Hillarycare: managed competition. This was an idea developed as a moderate compromise that would appeal to conservatives, and it dates back to the 1970’s. But this did not prevent it being falsely described as “socialist.” Check out a seminal paper in the history of managed competition here:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/12/suppl_1/24.abstract
James, thank you for the link.