From the very beginning of the GOP fight against the Affordable Care Act, and throughout the eight long years of Republican attacks, there is one simple, indisputable fact that is central to their defeat: programs that actually help people endure. Or, as Jonathan Chait puts it:
Ideas that bring real improvement to peoples’ lives have more staying power than ideas that do not.
Not that they endure without constant vigilance, as the latest assault demonstrates. But this simple truth will always be the core problem for the GOP: Democrats enact programs that are popular because they are—gasp— actually designed to make peoples’ lives better. Indeed, this is why the GOP fights so hard to prevent such programs from being enacted in the first place.
We know they will continue to lie, intimidate, and try to cheat their way to victory.
We also know how powerful our voices are in unified resistance [emphasis added].
Health-care policy will change. The Trump administration has powerful weapons to sabotage the functioning of the markets. But the world before Obamacare will never return. Health-care reform defied progressives for decades because the uninsured were a disorganized and politically voiceless group. Obamacare has transformed the non-constituency into a constituency. Republicans have had to promise to protect them, and when they tried to break that promise, it summoned a backlash unlike anything they could have imagined. The outpouring of political organizing to save the law shocked its would-be repealers. The movement to save Obamacare takes its place among the great social causes in American history.
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While elections swing back and forth between right and left, there is a reason that the United States is a more humane place today than it was 25 or 50 years ago. Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare have survived. Legalized child labor, supply-side economics, and unlimited pollution have withered.
Ideas that bring real improvement to peoples’ lives have more staying power than ideas that do not.
It sounds like the ultimate cliché, but this truth really is on our side. And that’s the GOP’s biggest nightmare.
Democrats now have an incredible opportunity to put forth bold ideas for universal health care.
A majority of Americans say it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. And a growing share [33%] now supports a “single payer” approach to health insurance, according to a [June, 2017] national survey by Pew Research Center.
Currently, 60% say the federal government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, while 39% say this is not the government’s responsibility. These views are unchanged from January, but the share saying health coverage is a government responsibility remains at its highest level in nearly a decade.
Furthermore, a whopping 83% of Democrats/leaners surveyed support this view, including 52% who support a single-payer program.
Onward!