It is a season of hubris for Obamacare’s critics. The website is behind schedule, the administration turns out to have misled the public when it insisted nobody would have to change plans, and the roughly 5 percent of Americans with plans on the individual-health-insurance market have been thrown into a panic amid a storm of cancellation notices. This is certainly a political victory for the Republican Party, which has turned the page from its shutdown debacle and found a batch of investigative strings to pull on, administration officials to torment, and new ways to throw red-state Democrats on the defensive. Weeks like this one will continue through this year, and at least for a while into the next one.
But conservatives want this moment to represent something more than a political victory. They sense an ideological victory: the discrediting of the Affordable Care Act as a policy model, a new opportunity for them to substitute their own vision. And there they are not only mistaken but deluding themselves in the fundamental way they have deluded themselves all along.
Which regulations do they want to strip away? Discrimination against people with preexisting conditions? Discrimination against potentially pregnant women? Mental-health parity? Every single one of those changes creates millions of angry potential victims.
This is exactly why the actual Republican Party health-care plan is not repeal and replace, but repeal and cackle. Republicans are on strong ground exploiting fear of change. They have understood perfectly well that they must avoid having to defend a different set of changes to the status quo. They have kept their various replace ideas safely to the side for exactly that reason.
And nothing that has happened since has fundamentally changed that. Republicans in red states have tools at their disposal to block insurance subsidies for the poorest Americans. They have political tools to embarrass Obama and his allies. They lack the votes to repeal Obamacare, and will continue to lack them for at least three more years. And by that point, a large number of the people whose interests they have so intently ignored — the uninsured — will be within the system, and will have joined the ranks of those benefiting from the status quo and resisting change to it.
And the teabagger war-on-the-poor continues... But not much longer...
You don't have anything... this belongs to President Obama and the Democrats hook, line and sinking. Here's a nice line up of the left questioning the ACA in an honest way... honest as in something you wouldn't understand...
Actually the old pre-ACA health care plans are looking pretty damned good right now for the millions losing their private insurance plans right after Christmas. Sorry Tiny Tim, no sled for you for Christmas, we don't know how many months it will be before we can access the expensive plans on the Healthcare.gov site.
ACA, ruin the plans of 90% of the American population to benefit the 1% who go bankrupt due to illness.
And more than 50% of Americans do prefer the old ways.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
LadyJazzer wrote: I saw that--in the same story that said the approval numbers for the GOTP/Republicans were at 22%...The worst in history; (76% DISAPPROVAL)...
God knows, I'M impressed...
I just hope you keep doin' what yer doin' ...PLEASE.
The GOP doesn't have to do anything... just sit back and watch the ACA implode :rofllol
The left is angry because they are now being judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
Sixty-three percent of voters want to replace their own member of Congress, which is the highest percentage ever recorded on this question that dates back to 1992;
