Pres. Obama kicked the issue of what he himself called” Obamacare”
into higher gear when he answered a
question posed by the media in an August 9 press conference. His response became an
attack on the GOP’s central campaign platform for
2014 midterms: to defund Obamacare and shut down the government if they
do not get their way. Obama charged, “ the
idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million
people from getting health care is a bad idea. “ With that answer, he put the
GOP on the defensive, a change from his own prior defensive reliance on simply enumerating health insurance
reform benefits. The Democratic Party’s job is now to run with the ball he has given
them and to take this new, more aggressive approach to the
public discourse.
If Obama and his
supporters continue to put the GOP on the defensive, the GOP will be unmasked for what it really is. It is an ideologically fixated party that protects a
health care system that leaves too many with
no access to good health care, and screws those already insured with anti
consumer practices that have made inability to pay health care bills the number one cause of personal
bankruptcy. The GOP’s Tea Party wing will also now have to defend their threat to close
down the government, a tactic the GOP tried once before that caused them to lose the
next election cycle.
By stating his health
care reform benefits in terms of what
health care consumers would lose if the GOP succeeded, Obama has a better chance to help the public understand the law’s benefits. So far just listing
benefits of the law has been a failed strategy.
However, enough of Obamacare has been implemented for those 85% already
insured by their employers for Pres. Obama to
make a good case. He can and did charge that the GOP wants to eliminate protecting consumers from insurers that use excessive amounts of premiums for administrative overhead or stop protecting them from denial of insurance because of life time
caps or pre-existing conditions. The GOP
will now have defend their proposal to delete
such
popular provisions as keeping
young adults on parent’s policies, or copay free cancer screening, annual
checkups and contraception.
The right wing media is full of claims that Obamacare is
already a failure, a bit premature since
the implementation of the provision that would give a way for the uninsured to
buy affordable insurance through exchanges has not even happened and will not
begin until October, when consumers can begin to sign up.
What will happen
before the November 2014 midterms is that enough states will have successfully
implemented Obamacare to show the potential of success to other states who have done all
they can to sabotage the program by refusing to expand Medicaid and/ or failed
to set up their own affordable market place insurance systems. That explains why the Tea Party is focusing
on defunding at this time , hoping to knock out the ability of states to
succeed by taking away their ability to
finance implementation. The Tea Party
fears Obamacare’s success.
That there are some improvements that could be made in the
law is indisputable. For example, the small number of businesses butting up to the 50 employee threshold level and do not already
offer insurance, may reduce their full time workforce. There are proposals that
have been made to solve the issue, but
the GOP Party of No refuses to even
consider any legislative tweaks in favor of just killing off the entire
legislation. Therefore, the President has been making his own tweaks whenever he can do it administratively.
Obama is onto
something. His approach of going on the attack by painting the GOP
into an anti consumer, unreasonable corner may well be a winner.
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