“Obamacare” could be a historic success for the Republican Party, but they botched it. Conservatives attached the pejorative “Obamacare” label while lying non-stop about the Affordable Care Act, a brand of health reform far worse than Nazi Germany, among many, many other things. While the President is trying to enhance the health care system ranked number 37 (between Costa Rica and Slovenia) in the world by the World Health Organization, Republicans have been hard at work doing everything they can to hamstring any change. But this whole time they should have worked for it, ensured its success, and taken the credit they might actually deserve. After all, the Affordable Care Act is little more than Massachusetts’ Romneycare (appropriated from the conservative Heritage Foundation).
The hard right should be shouting, “Look, we won! We forced the Democrats to embrace health care reform that distributes tax dollars to billion-dollar corporate insurance companies! It’s our health care proposal, and we even got it with significantly less abortion coverage than that liberal Romneycare.” Consider how the far left would be carrying on about the insufficiencies of this Republican health care plan. The conservative windfall offering no Public Option. Hundreds of billions of government dollars will be going to corporations to pay for the millions of new customers for private insurance companies. Plenty of Democrats would agree with President Obama when he says “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” and he would have no trouble dragging more than enough disgruntled Democratic votes which, when combined with every Republican, would pass everything everywhere by overwhelming margins. Every state in the Union would have its own Marketplace and the well-documented failures of the IT infrastructure and federal site built for all of the states that refused to play ball would have been dramatically less problematic.
It’s an open political debate on which side approaches the 2014 mid-terms (and 2016 Presidential contest) in better shape. A big chunk of the conservative strategy seems to rest on riding the anti-Obamacare wave they fomented. Which may or may not prove successful. But imagine, for a second, imagine a unified federal government (mostly, there would certainly be liberal detractors) that embraced the Affordable Care Act. Even skeptical Democrats would have a very hard time scrounging up significant numbers of people to oppose a bi-partisan Affordable Care Act.
The Republican Party would be in a much better position to take back the Senate if they were busily taking credit for insuring millions of Americans. To be sure, there are political points to be scored by railing against a broken website. But now that HealthCare.gov seems to be nearly 100 percent, all the detractors have left is distorted conservative fairy tales about “death panels” and fraudulent Hawaiian birth certificates as their best arguments against health care. By refusing to embrace and demand credit for the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party is cutting off their nose to spite their face.