Here's a steaming pile of
not at all helpful from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who says that Democrats shouldn't have bothered with Obamacare in the first two years of President Obama's term.
"Unfortunately, Democrats lost the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform," the No. 3 Democratic senator, a leader on messaging and policy, told reporters in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
Schumer said Obamacare, enacted in March 2010, was a "good bill" that he's "proud" to have voted for, but he said it "should have come later" after Democrats had adequately addressed the woes of the middle class.
"The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed, but it was not the change we were hired to make," he said. "Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs, not changes in health care. This makes sense, considering 85 percent of all Americans got their health care from either the government, Medicare, Medicaid, or their employer. And if health care costs were going up, it really did not affect them. The Affordable Care Act was aimed at the 36 million Americans who were not covered. It has been reported that only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote."
Plenty of people on this side of the political spectrum shouted that the stimulus should have been substantially larger and done more. But Schumer is entirely ignoring the impact to the economy that having 48 million—and it was 48 million rather than the 36 million he references—uninsured. The cost to the healthcare system of having an over-reliance on emergency care. The lost wages from sick people unable to receive treatment. The lost buying power uninsured families had when having to scramble to pay for medical care. While ultimately the law was whittled down to cover 36 million uninsured (many of the remaining are ineligible under the law), getting health insurance to those millions helped.
Which leads us to this:
The message of Schumer's speech, which came weeks after his party lost the Senate majority, was that "Democrats must embrace government" as a vehicle to help the middle class in order to win the 2016 election.
"The focus on Obamacare gave anti-government forces in the Republican party new vigor and life, at least temporarily," he said, referencing Democrats' defeat in the 2010 elections.
Democrats could have embraced government—they could have made the sale for why government works—by defending the fact that they were getting health insurance to millions of people who didn't have it. That they were saving seniors billions in prescription drug costs.
Let's also make this crystal clear: The backlash in 2010 wasn't about Obamacare. It was about the black president. Yes, Republicans were running on an "anti-government" platform, but that was a transparent veneer over their anti-everything Obama platform. Whatever massive initiative Obama and the Democrats had come up with in those first two years would have been fought as bitterly as this one.
