A Washington state Democrat said that Republicans dubbed the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” so that they could symbolically destroy President Obama when they destroy the bill.
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) said GOPs in Congress are just trying “more of the same game” in efforts to defund and dismantle Obamacare.
“They’ve been trying to discredit it. Tear it apart. Tear it down, repeal it. Whatever you want to do. They’re trying to do it as long as they get rid of healthcare for the American people,” McDermott told MSNBC, branding Obamacare adviser Jonathan Gruber’s comments “careless remarks people make in situations.”
“But the real facts are, it’s working, and the American people know it. And the Republicans are absolutely apoplectic trying to find some way to do the president in, but they can’t do it because it’s a good idea.”
Obamacare working, McDermott argued, “was their fear from the very beginning, that what the president was putting together would work for the American people and then the people would say, gee, the Democrats have delivered what we really need.”
“So they are fighting a losing battle, but you got to give it to them,” he added. “They are stubborn if they’re not very thoughtful.”
The congressman stressed that “no one in this country believes that people shouldn’t be secure when they get sick, that they know they’ll be taken care of, that they won’t be bankrupted by an injury.”
“That question is not the question here. The question has always been whether the president will get credit for doing it. That’s why they called it Obamacare. Because they wanted to call it Obamacare and then destroy it and they could say, well, you see, he wasn’t much of a president anyway.”
The Obama administration and DNC began using the term Obamacare before the last presidential election, saying they wanted to put a positive spin on the word.
In the next Congress, McDermott predicted that Republican lawmakers will purposely “try and drive his numbers down so that people will say he’s a failure.”
“We had the best job numbers last month that you could have. We’ve gone up 330,000 people. The actual wage growth was .4 percent, which is the biggest it’s been in months, in fact in years. And yet they continue to talk about what a failure he is,” he said. “That’s the whole point, is to make him a failure, so that in the 2016 election, they start to say, well, we’ve had a failed presidency, now we got to elect a Republican. That’s what this is all about.”
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