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February 10, 2016 12:31 PM UTC

Repeal Obamacare! Oh, Wait a Minute...

  • 20 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

obamacaresThe AP has a great story up today via the Fort Collins Coloradoan on the dramatic drop in the number of uninsured Americans following passage of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Much to the chagrin of local Republicans bent on repealing President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment, Colorado is at the top of the list of success stories:

GOP presidential candidates are vowing to repeal “Obamacare,” while offering hardly any detail on how they’d replace it without millions losing coverage.

Politically, the eight states with statistically significant coverage gains in the National Health Interview Survey are a mix of red, blue and purple. They are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, and New York. Five have GOP governors.

As a whole, the nation had an uninsured rate of 9.1 percent during the first nine months of 2015, according to the survey, an ongoing research project by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The uninsured rate was 14.4 percent in 2013, before the law’s big coverage expansion…

That poses a dilemma for Republican presidential candidates. Indeed, a recent blueprint from a group of conservative policy experts for replacing the health law said Republicans will need some kind of “grandfathering exemption” to avoid disrupting the lives of people who have gained coverage through the Affordable Care Act. [Pols emphasis]

What we’re seeing here is exactly what Republicans who opposed the passage of Obamacare in 2009-10 were most afraid of–not that they could admit being afraid of it, but was always the bottom line lurking beneath their shrill and desperate arguments against passage. After passage, the fear of what’s happening today drove the GOP campaign to repeal the law before it could take full effect, instilling Republican opponents of the law with a profound sense of urgency to stop it, and rationalizing all of the outlandish claims of harm the law was inflicting on Americans.

They were afraid because they knew that Obamacare would work. That it would make health coverage affordable for millions of Americans, absorb those millions into a less selective risk pool, and put in place a system that will hurt millions of people to take away. The fact is, Obamacare is not a “government takeover of health care”–the plan has its origins largely in conservative designs for health care reform, a mandate to obtain coverage and assistance for those who can’t afford it.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there remains a strong possibility that the success of Obamacare will do lasting political damage to Republicans who so bitterly opposed it. What’s missing right now, frankly, may be a successful repeal effort, or at least one with an appreciable chance of success. Up until now, Republican threats against Obamacare have been threats against an abstraction, a monster they could define for the public. But increasingly, the public can see with their own eyes that Obamacare is helping people. They know someone who is getting coverage cheaper, or for the first time. Or, like millions of Americans, they are themselves directly benefiting.

And folks, there is no going back. Too many would suffer, for no other reason than to help the GOP win a six-year-old political struggle that has lost its ability to frighten–except maybe to frighten those who could now lose what they have gained.

The war on Obamacare is over. It’s time for the politicians to catch up with that reality.

Comments

20 thoughts on “Repeal Obamacare! Oh, Wait a Minute…

  1. Cruz doesn't care. Tea Partiers would scream to get it repealed on Day One if one of their candidates made it in to office. And to Hell with the freeloaders who are relying on the government for their health care. And they'll want to kill off Medicare and Medicaid while they're at it, and privatize Social Security, too.

    1. I'm still waiting for some smart politician to make the point that people without insurance still go to the hospital and receive health care – They're the freeloaders. Except that most of them are too poor to afford health insurance, so it's really bad taste (of a Trumpian magnitude) to point that out. But it could be stated that we all pay for health care for the poor already, just through more expensive hospitalization. Duh.

  2. They don't care if it takes insurance away from millions of Americans. They have stated time an again that they want the "Free" Market to determine if you should live or die.

  3. Same story with how they claim Obama has ruined America and the media rarely point out that actually, since 2008, pretty much every aspect of the economy has improved by all objective measures.  Even with the latest stock market downturn we're miles ahead of where we were and the American auto industry not only didn't go under but turmed out to be a worthy public investment. Very frusrtating that they get to go on about making America great again when it's been steadily getting "greater" under the Obama administration.

    They could complain it's not enough but to complain that we've lost ground under Obama is flat out lying, not that you'd know that from media coverage or even back in 2014 from Dems running for office who preferred not to mention any of the progress while treating everything Obama like nuclear waste.

    They just claim everything under Obama has been a failure and nobody bothers to call them on it.

    1. Hitch is hospitals aren't allowed to let peope die on their doorstep when they show up at the ER (some ER finally has to take them) so the GOP plan, efficient as it sounds, actually costs a whole lot more than universal single payer national coverage.

        1. The court’s right-wing justices seemed to forget that the best argument for the individual mandate was made in 1989 by a respected conservative, the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler.

          “If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street,” Butler said, “Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may be angry but we will not deny him services — even if that means more prudent citizens end up paying the tab. A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract.”

          Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to reject the sense of solidarity that Butler embraced. When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli explained that “we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care,” Scalia replied coolly: “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.” Does this mean letting Butler’s uninsured guy die?

           

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/activist-judges-on-trial/2012/03/28/gIQAKdE2gS_story.html

  4. Just because Obama cribbed a few pages of the 2000 monstrosity that is Obamacare from old Republican ideas does not make the law any better. You're right that we need to have a replacement that works ready, but Obamacare must be repealed and replaced. The next Republican president will do it.

    1. Modster, I realize you're a moron and all, but you don't seem to realize that the reason Trump is leading your clown parade is because a growing number of your voters are tired of hearing Republicans promising that Obamacare will be repealed and replaced for the last 6 years, and other assorted broken "promises".

      It has dawned on them that GOP POLITICIANS are nothing but liars, hate-mongers and scam artists who are powerless or unwilling to deliver on these false promises.

      So now instead of a professional politician, they prefer an amateur, but successful liar, hate-monger and scam artist like Trump to actually deliver on their wet dreams, because, you know, he just will!

        1. Oh forget it. The point is that Sanders and Trump are appealing to outsiders and malcontents, and some of that is driven by Obama not being able to keep his promises. We political types know that's because of obstruction and by design, but too many Americans don't.

          1. Agreed — but unfortunately neither Sanders nor Trump will be any better equipped to deliver on their promises, given the realities of the GOP-controlled Congress and SCOTUS. (well Trump wouldn’t be limited by the GOP Congress, just the outlandishly impossible nature of his promises)

            So disillusionment and heartbreak on the part of their fervent supporters are guaranteed if either somehow gets elected.

            Trump would be a disaster; Sanders merely ineffectual, but a good moral example and could inspire positive changes in ways that most of us probably couldn't predict.

            1. Agreed that Sanders, like Obama, would face an obstructive Congress. But, under Obama, Osama Bin Laden is dead and the Detroit auto industry is alive. He pulled us out of the Bush recession, and has curtailed American ground troop involvement in the mideast, even though it's taken 9 years to do it. 

              I was able to get health insurance in between salaried jobs, along with 17 million  other Americans. The economy recovered under Obama, as Bluecat said, by any objective (mon-GOP talking point) measure. 

              My African American students stood a little taller, and their ambitions grew larger under the first African-American president.

              I actually think Sander's curmudgeonliness would be a presidential asset; he would have more realistic expectations about bipartisan cooperation than his predecessor. So would Hillary, for that matter.  She will not hesitate to pull any strings possible to accomplish goals.

              Sanders could call into question the whole premise of profit before people, corporations as a privileged class of citizen, the interests of a small group of shareholders vs. the long term interest of the world community. I have no illusions that all of this can be accomplished in 4 or 8 years, but, like davie, I think that more can be done than we can imagine right now.

          2. And what's worse is that the folks following Trump and Sanders do not realize how outlandish and undeliverable their promises are. 

            People are PO'd because Obama made promises that couldn't be delivered. Fine but does anyone in his or her right mind actually believe that there will be a "beautiful wall" built which Mexico will pay for, or that Bernie will provide the free stuff that he's promising (college tuition, single payer health care) or make the Citizens United decision go away. You can do a lot with executive orders, but get real. 

            If either of these two actually got elected, all they would do is make voters ever more cynical than they already are.

            I'm liking Kasich more and more. He's a lot more conservative than I'm comfortable with but he seems like a decent guy who is a problem-solver. But I don't have to anguish over the thought of voting for him in November. There is no way in hell he ends up being the nominee.

            1. Kaisich solves problems: union-busting, voting restrictions, cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood… He's even willing to override voter initiatives. But he won't solve the problem of climate change, since it's not really our fault. He's no moderate, he's just less outrageous than the rest of the clown car.

              As far as being unreasonable, we will never reach the stars if we don't think we can make it past the corner store. Sanders knows the Congress, and surely knows that without a major shift, he won't get most of his agenda through. But there are lots of people tired of staring at their shoes moping. Trump is worse: he could get a lot of what he wants if one or two convenient Supreme Court justices were to leave the bench. Congress is crazy enough to pass at least some of what he says he wants; the only thing blocking him is the remaining shreds of sanity sometimes present at the Court.

              So l'd advise we not under-estimate the chances of the outside agitator candidates, or what they could accomplish.

    2. How about this. Mod-ster?

      (President?) Trump repeals Obamacare.  He then replaces it with the nearly identical Obamacare TRUMP-CARE, and to improve it, adds a Public Option!

      Just dreamin'

    3. A few pages came from some old Republican ideas?

      This was your party's market-based solution to something called Hillary-care back in early '90's.  And your party's '12 presidential nominee actually tested it out while he was governor of Massachusetts.

      You people do one thing right – come up with an idea that actually reduces the number of uninsured – and when the Dems implement you, you denounce it.

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