DNC Chair: On Second Thought, Maybe We Should Change A Few Things About Obamacare

Well, this is a bit out of the blue. Obamacare’s implementation is less than a week away. But the head of the Democrat Party is expressing some desire to see the law changed.

One of President Obama’s strongest health care advocates in Congress, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is advocating for changes to Obamacare, counseling Democrats that “we must not treat every minute provision in the law as sacred.”

In a move that might surprise many in her party, Wasserman Schultz, who is also the head of the Democratic National Committee, said the Obamacare supporters currently fighting GOP demands to defund the health care act “should be open to suggestions for improving the law.”

What’s more, “that engagement certainly should include past critics of the law,” the popular Democrat urges in her upcoming policy book, “For the Next Generation,” to be released on Oct. 15. Publisher St. Martin’s Press provided Secrets with an advance copy.

Wasserman Schultz, a breast cancer survivor, has been one of the most passionate defenders of Obamacare and in her book calls Republican criticism “the most hysterical reaction in American politics since Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid campaign against so-called communist spies.”

But, there were communist spies in the US government. Not “so-called,” actual spies and operatives. The highest placed among them was probably FDR’s Secretary of Commerce, Henry A. Wallace. Wallace was by no means the only communist to attain high office in the US government.

But she said that as Obamacare nears implementation, problems might arise that could undermine the public’s perception of and participation in the law and Washington should move fast to fix it. “We’re at a critical juncture of the implementation of Obamacare,” she wrote. “If people find the exchanges too cumbersome or confusing, enrollment will suffer, as will public perception of the law.”

Wasserman Schultz called on the GOP and others to offer alternatives and for those interested in changing Obamacare to suggest fixes, even if the ideas are from foreign governments.

The GOP has offered alternatives. Two simple fixes — tort reform and allowing insurance purchase across state lines — have not been tried. The Democrats expressly avoided tort reform because they feared taking on the trial lawyers. If they’ve seen the light on those two reforms, great. But there’s no evidence that they have.