When they're not offering the lamest possible defenses of their horrible law, as Rob showed you earlier this morning, Democrats are coalescing around a rather novel talking point concerning the utter collapse of ObamaCare. Are you ready for this? The disastrous failure of a law shoved down an unwilling nation's throat by Democrat votes - and only Democrat votes - over the loud and determined objections of every Republican in the country, is the fault of (drumroll) Republicans.
Yep. Steven Waldman, writing in Fortune, pretty well encapsulates this hot new talking point:
Obamacare is hurting my family, and I blame…the Republicans.
Allow me to unpack that sentiment. The Schoolhouse Rockversion of policy progress is: Congress passes law. Congress passes “technical fix” bill a year two later. Congress does more substantial changes a through a reauthorization a few years later. Ok maybe the “technical fix” part didn’t make the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon song but the point is that the normal, expected legislative process assumed constant refinement. That a law needed changes was not a sign of its failure; it was a sign of it being a law.
Today’s Republicans have taken the position that since the Affordable Care Act must be repealed, it must not be fixed. Why repair the car you’re about to send to the scrapyard? The problem of course is that six years have passed, and there has been no repeal nor major fixes.
Sadly, we’ve all gotten used to this. Ah these wacky partisan times! But it’s worth repeating: to try to damage Barack Obama, Republicans have intentionally made Americans suffer more. The target has always been the president; the victims turn out to be millions of families.
This is the same argument Obama tried last week, although he somehow tripped all over himself and ended up comparing ObamaCare quite aptly to an exploding cell phone. I don't know which Democrat communication guru dreamed this one up, but they all got the memo and they're all jumping on it: ObamaCare is like a product a company makes, and when it turns out is has flaws, you fix the flaws. So the Democrats did their job by creating the product. But now that it needs to be fixed, Republicans aren't doing their job because they refuse to fix it!
Now let's deconstruct this so-called logic, shall we? Republicans would be more than happy to replace the disastrous ObamaCare model with something that actually works, but Democrats don't want that. They want ObamaCare merely "tweaked," but the basic structure of the law left alone. The problem, of course, is that the basic structure of the law is the problem. ObamaCare is failing because it bum rushed a disproportionately sick pool of people into the overall insurance pool without allowing for any rate or cost adjustments to account for the inevitable explosion in health services consumption.
That's exactly what ObamaCare was intended to do, and Democrats somehow thought you could do this without blowing the economics of the system to high heaven. Either that or they knew all along that it would fail, and when it did it would provide the perfect opportunity to take the next step to full-on socialized medicine. The only problem with that theory is that they don't control either house of Congress right now, so in order to be in a position to pass single-payer they're going to have to sell the public on the idea that ObamaCare's only real flaw is the need of a tweak, and only the horrible, partisan Republicans are standing in the way of making this happen.
The question could be turned around on them, of course. Since ObamaCare is clearly not working, why is President Obama being so obstinate and partisan in his refusal to sign legislation that would replace it with something that works better? There is certainly no shortage of ideas in the Republican Congress - some better than others - but none of them have any chance of going anywhere as long as Obama is in the White House.
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Why are they the obstructionists and not him?
Besides, the whole analogy doesn't work to begin with. When a company puts out a product that's basically popular but has a few issues, then of course, it puts out a new version of the same product. When a company puts out a product that everyone hates, the company scurries to come out with something different entirely so as to erase the reviled product from the marketplace and from people's memories as quickly as possible. Remember Vista? It was Microsoft's glitchy disaster of an operating system, and many people simple refused to upgrade from Windows XP until they could wait out the demise of Vista and the release of Windows 7. And when we got Windows 7, it wasn't just a "tweaked" version of Vista. It was as if Vista had never happened. Microsoft knew it had laid an egg with Vista and the only thing it could do was go back to the drawing board and do something different.
ObamaCare is the Vista of laws. It's a total disaster and no one defends it unless they are duty-bound to do so by virtue of their partisan affiliations. The solution to the problem is not for the Republican Congress to assent to Obama's favored "tweaks." It's to rip the whole thing up from its foundation and replace it with something entirely different. The fact that the law has been in place however many years is not a reason to keep it in place if it's not working. Indeed, the longer this goes on the more we see there was never anything to the Democrat claim that people would love it once they got to know it.
No. People don't love it. They don't love the soaring premiums. They don't love the narrowed service options. They don't love the insurers bailing on the exchanges. They don't love the higher taxes they're paying to support the subsidies.
They see what you and I see: ObamaCare has failed. And that's solely on the shoulders of the people who obstinately passed it in the first place, despite the clear and correct warnings that it would be a disaster. They're the ones who made this mess. They don't get to dictate the terms of how the problem gets solved.
When they're not offering the lamest possible defenses of their horrible law, as Rob showed you earlier this morning, Democrats are coalescing around a rather novel talking point concerning the utter collapse of ObamaCare. Are you ready for this? The disastrous failure of a law shoved down an unwilling nation's throat by Democrat votes - and only Democrat votes - over the loud and determined objections of every Republican in the country, is the fault of (drumroll) Republicans.
Yep. Steven Waldman, writing in Fortune, pretty well encapsulates this hot new talking point:
