What a difference a year could make in the GOP's war on Obamacare

What a difference a year could make

In the GOP’s  war on Obamacare,   Republicans are taking a risk  if they rely on anti Obamacare messages  in the November  2014 midterms. The issues  today will not be the same  a year from now. There is time for a  significant number of their voters to realize while Republicans want Obamacare to fail, they also will begin to realize that the GOP also wants them to fail to be able to get good affordable insurance.  

While the GOP has had a field day attacking the administration for  the  botched web site rollout and shaming the President’s failure to live up to his alleged “promise” to allow “all to keep their insurance if they liked it”,  these are short term jolts.  A year from now the federal  web site will have been  up and running for  months. .   Enough customers will have signed up for Obamacare  by mid term elections in 2014  to have heard good things  from friends and family and  realize the GOP fear hyping predictions were   more hot air than not.    After four years of trying, the GOP still  would not be able to propose  a comparable alternative  and have concluded  that it is political suicide to repeal  benefits many already  enjoyed.

 The President’s administrative fix , allowing consumers to keep their substandard policies for a year and to allow insurers to sell substandard plans to existing customers,  takes the wind out of the sails of that issue . All holders of cancelled policies will  have had a year’s chance to seek better, cheaper policies.  In fact, in  Colorado ( www.connectforhealthco.com )and in fourteen other states,   they  have the opportunity now  to shop in the state run exchanges that are functioning well.  

The President’s fix  shoves  the responsibility to reinstate cancelled policies to the insurers and the state insurance commissioners. However,  as insurance executives  complain about  administrative hardships and  a few  state insurance commissioners  sided with insurers,  other  commissioners, including Colorado’s, announced they would cooperate with Obama’s plan.

During the shaping and passage of the health reform law,  President Obama had studiously avoided bad mouthing insurance companies whose anti consumer practices were  the reasons for the reform law in the first place..  He needed their participation in the exchanges. But Democrats in Congress feel no constraints. Democrats have already indicated they will  go on the offensive, threatening to hold insurers’ feet to the fire  for excessive rate increases in advance of the health care law taking effect as a way to pressure them to go along with the President’s “fix”.

The GOP overreached and lost a chance to override a veto promised by the President. Some  Democratic members of the House   facing re-election in unsafe seats, voted for a Republican bill, but not enough of them  to make the bill veto proof.  In addition to allowing individual policy holders to keep their old policies,  the GOP    proposed that even new customers  could buy  substandard policies .  This was a subtle time bomb. It  would  cancel out  Obamacare’s purpose to protect consumers from insurer’s unfair practices and divert the healthy from buying insurance through the exchanges,  undermining the law’s financial soundness that depends on a diverse pool of healthy young   and others that are  all paying in.