Or is it the “Affordable” Care Act? I forget which one is the proper usage, which seems to be based on how much Obama’s signature legislation is hurting him
Obamacare tradeoffs: Now they tell us …
President Barack Obama is suffering the worst season of his presidency because people are mad that critical parts of the Affordable Care Act are not working the way they are supposed to work.
The larger longer-term threat to his signature legislative achievement—and to his presidency generally—is different. It is the growing backlash over Obamacare working precisely the way it is supposed to work. (snip)
But the problem with Obamacare’s stumbling start is that it shined a harsh light on intended consequences — more costs and more government regulation — that were always embedded in the ACA, yet were deliberately downplayed by Obama and Democrats on the way to passage. Backers hoped the costs of the ACA and its roster of losers would remain obscured after launch in a rush of good feeling about the laws benefits and its roster of winners.
Writers John F. Harris and David Nather then describe some of those conditions in detail, moving on to
It is not as if these trade-offs — the kind required by any big social program — were not understood by experts at the time Obamacare was being debated in 2009 and 2010. But they certainly weren’t part of the pitch Obama and the Democrats made to the rest of America — the people who shouldn’t have had to read between the lines to know what was going to happen.
Said experts told us exactly what was going to happen with Obamacare, what the intended, and unintended, outcomes would be. Especially the opponents of O-care. Don’t liberals constantly tell us that they are the Smartest People Ever? Yet so many really do seem surprised as to what O-care causes to happen. One would think reporters would have taken the time to find out about the law, you know, doing their jobs as reporters, instead of listening in a zombie like rapture to the words of Obama and Democrats
It’s not that Obama tried to make health care reform sound like a completely free lunch. He talked about the need for young and healthy people to buy health insurance, and for most businesses to cover their workers. What he didn’t say, though, was that healthy people might have to pay more to cover sick people — or that people who already had individual health insurance would have to upgrade, even if they liked their skimpy coverage.
Except, that’s exactly how Obama pushed it, that it would be a free lunch. His supporters sure thought so. He talked about all the wonderful stuff people would get for lower costs. And he lied about so many aspects, to the point it could be criminal fraud. But, you know, Republicans
Republicans in Congress have been quick to say that they warned of the dangers of the law. But the truth is that they sounded the alarms about so many threats, including dubious assertions about death panels and the slippery slope to a Canadian-style single-payer health care system, that they never put any sustained focus on the very specific tradeoffs people are seeing now.
Yet, the majority of US citizens were against the ACA even before it passed. And now Liberals are agitating for single payer. And the “death panels” that didn’t exist was quietly taken out of the bill by Harry Reid, before quietly being reinserted (Independent Payment Advisory Board). Might Harris and Nather have done some deep research on the law before passage? They could have read it, for one thing.
It’s a long article, which really seems surprised that many, many people will get hosed, healthy people paying through the nose for sick people, costs skyrocketing, care reduced, etc. It would have been nice had Politico considered the ramifications back in 2010.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Read: Politico Is Super Surprised That No One Told Them About The Intended Consequences Of Obamacare »
