Flail.
The
Republicans flailing to find a message now that Obamacare is working is kind of a blast to watch. Are they going to completely abandon Obamacare and make the election all about Harry Reid? They can't do that, they've invested way too much into convincing the tea party crazies that they'll fight this law to the end.
But now they can't keep up the fiction that it's doomed to fail. They can't call it socialism because too many regular Americans are now paying money to private insurance companies to pay for it, and they can't really call those people socialists. In their zeal to find something, anything, to attack the law, they're making a damned good case for something like Medicare for all. First we've got the Kochs telling voters that it's horrible that Democrats worked with evil insurance companies to design the law, and now Jonathon Cohn reports, they're complaining that the law isn't actually universal.
The President's health care law continues to fall short of covering the uninsured, but he still claims it's "working"
http://t.co/...
— @GOPWhip
Remember, House Republicans have voted to repeal Obamacare 50 times. They have voted on serious Obamacare alternatives exactly zero times. They haven’t even made a serious attempt to get a bill out of committee, let alone hold a floor debate. A few Republican lawmakers have crafted proposals on their own, as have some conservative intellectuals. But GOP leaders have made it very clear they want nothing to do with these plans.
In addition, a major reason the Affordable Care Act isn’t reaching more people is that Republicans have done their best to limit the law’s reach—primarily, by blocking expansions of Medicaid in states where conservative Republicans hold sway.
If they're really, really worried about making sure everyone gets access to health care, there's a solution. But as they've demonstrated time and time again, solutions aren't what they're after. They can only offer mindless, knee-jerk "Obamacare bad" diatribes that make less and less sense.
