This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Repealing Obamacare

It's pretty clear by now what we're going to be hearing from the Republican Party as we head into the 2014 midterm elections.  Unsurprisingly, they will be arguing for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.  It's going to be a strategic error for them, and Democrats should be poised to take advantage of their vulnerability if we don't chicken out like New Hampshire's U.S. Representatives Carol Shea-Porter and Anne Kuster did with their supporting votes for a law allowing insurance companies to offer junk health insurance policies indefinitely ("Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013").  With their votes, they ran away from a fight that has to happen.

We know that it's a tactical maneuver to distance themselves from the hangups of the law's rollout, but these things are temporary.  The law will improve as deficiencies are ironed out.  We also realize that Shea-Porter and Kuster know that the law they supported would go nowhere in the Senate, nor would it survive a White House veto even if it did, but everyone else does too, so their votes look both cowardly and cynical.  Exacerbating their mistake is that it's unnecessary.  In trying to cover themselves, Shea-Porter and Kuster have made themselves more vulnerable.  It's a good thing for them that their opponents are who they are, because their opponents are nihilists.

We Democrats must stand our ground.  It's easy to do because it's the high ground.

What do Republicans want?  They want to repeal Obamacare.  With what will they replace it?  With nothing.  Think about it.

The Affordable Care Act has a lot of popular benefits that people will not want to relinquish.  My wife is carrying her two twenty-something daughters on her insurance policy because of it.  They'd get booted off if Obamacare was repealed.  All the people with preexisting conditions would be thrown back into the lurch by either pricing them out of the market or through outright denial of coverage.  Many millions of Americans are now covered by Medicaid when they had nothing before.  They'd be back in the ditch.  We have tens of millions of Americans who will be brought under the health insurance umbrella.  With their work to undo Obamacare, the Republican Party shows that it has no moral problem letting them shiver in a cold rain.

The GOP is in a much weaker position than those in it imagine.  You can't keep the popular and virtuous parts of Obamacare without the support of the more difficult parts, like making people who don't want to buy health insurance buy some, or by making healthy people with junk insurance upgrade to more comprehensive policies.  Those kinds of things are what make health insurance more affordable and better.  With Obamacare, many more people will be helped than harmed, and dismantling Obamacare would harm many more than otherwise.

In 2008, a supermajority of Americans supported the reform of the American healthcare system.  All Democratic politicians vying for their party's nomination had competing positions on it.  President Obama won the nomination, and he openly campaigned on healthcare reform in the general election.  It wasn't his biggest single issue, but it was one of them.  He won on reform in part when his position was no secret because, among other things, the American people demanded it.

It's indisputable that they did.  In 2009, Governor Mitt Romney was on Meet the Press criticizing the Democrats' work to begin healthcare reform before the actual shape of it was known.  He spoke with the assumption that Democrats would be going for a single-payer-type system or public option for health insurance.  What he suggested would work better than his assumptions was what he did in Massachusetts.  He called it "a model that worked."  My point here is to show that the national desire for healthcare reform was recognized even by major figures in the Republican Party.  At that point, they wanted to be part of the healthcare solution because the public desire for one was real, and the reality of the desire was based on necessity.

Which leads us back to the original point.  Republicans want to repeal Obamacare.  With what will they replace it?  Nothing.  Their relish at glitches in the Affordable Care Act is matched only by an eagerness to sabotage improvements.

40 million Americans are uninsured.  We have medical bankruptcies.  We have 45,000 surplus deaths annually because illnesses go undetected until it's too late for treatments.  These are the Republican alternatives to Obamacare.  Theirs is a bad deal and America won't buy it.

Democrats worried about uncertainty in their future prospects should take heart because the GOP will put no greater effort into anything else than destroying Obamacare, and their goal of destruction with no road map to anywhere else is no secret.  Their agenda's appeal is limited chiefly to their rightist base.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?