ObamaCare skidded to an all-time low in the latest Fox News poll, but in a switch, it’s Democrats who are driving down the already unpopular law. In June, 22 percent of Democrats were opposed to ObamaCare, which blends expansive new health-insurance regulations with a new welfare program. In the latest survey, that number rose to 30 percent, helping push overall opposition to a new high of 59 percent. (Just 36 percent overall supported the law.) While the number that is most encouraging to Republican hopes of taking control of the Senate is the sky-high 64 percent opposition to the law among independents, the spike in Democratic opposition promises to be very consequential.
I wonder if Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is still promising that her fellow and sister Democrats will run on ♡bamaCare!!! in the fall. (Actually, no I don’t; she’s too busy trying to make backroom deals to kill the Iran sanctions bill.)
But here’s Greg Sargent to the rescue:
Late yesterday, Utah governor Gary Herbert announced that the state will expand Medicaid to cover more of the uninsured. There are two possible mechanisms to do this, but both would spend more federal money to expand coverage to tends of thousands. His quote was telling: “Doing nothing…I’ve taken off the table. Doing nothing is not an option.” He added that it is “not fair” to allow some 60,000 Utah residents to fall into the “Medicaid gap.”
Doing nothing in the face of Obamacare’s offer of cash for states to cover their uninsured is precisely the response foes prefer — partly because such coverage will be so hard to take away. Several other GOP-controlled states are also looking for their own ways to opt in to the Medicaid expansion — which is to say, to accept federal money to expand coverage while achieving nominal distance from ♡bamaCare!!!.
Sargent goes on in this vein, as if the Medicare expansion was ♡bamaCare!!!’s heart and soul.
Well, no.
Medicaid expansion is just throwing more money (and admittedly, adding more coverage) at a program already destined to bankrupt the country. But it’s not like Republicans (think Medicare D) aren’t guilty of the exact same kind of thing.
♡bamaCare!!!’s real heart is all the rest, which has collapsed the private individual market, put the squeeze on the middle class, effectively capped income, turned private insurers into happy wards of the state, added thousands of new IRS agents to harass us, collectivized our medical history, and all the rest of the supposedly unintended consequences.
If Republicans are cracking on fight that, then they’re no longer an opposition party. But it seems more likely at this point that the Democrats will be the first to blink.
Time will tell, of course, but cheerleading the Medicaid expansion won’t fix what’s wrong with every single other damn thing this law has done.
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