Passing Obamacare in 2010, when the country was still struggling to dig out of the Great Recession, was a critical political miscalculation by Democrats that led to the GOP takeover of the House, contends Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).
Speaking to reporters at the National Press Club in Washington Tuesday, Schumer pointed out that only a tiny fraction of the electorate, he suggested 5%, stood to directly benefit from the federal healthcare law because most voters have coverage through their employer or government programs.
“To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense,” said Schumer, a past chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “So when Democrats focused on healthcare, the average middle-class person thought 'the Democrats are not paying enough attention to me.'”
Despite his strong misgivings about the political ramifications of the law's passage, Schumer defended the merits of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He argued that it's helping to reduce the cost of healthcare and ease the country's long-term deficit concerns.
“Our healthcare system was riddled with unfairness and inefficiencies,” Schumer said. “It was a problem desperately in need of fixing. The changes that were made are, and will continue to be, positive changes. But we would have been better able to address it if Democrats had first proposed and passed bold programs aimed at a broader swath of the middle class.”
The political fallout from Obamacare didn't stop there, Schumer argued. Last year's disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov further helped reinforce Republican talking points that government is incompetent. That allowed Republicans to recover from the self-inflicted wounds of the government shutdown in 2013 and win control of the Senate this year.
“They turned Obamacare into a general metaphor and falsely convinced the electorate that government wouldn't work anywhere,” Schumer said. “The focus on Obamacare gave anti-government forces in the Republican party new vigor and new life.”
Schumer scoffed at the suggestion that his candid assessment of the political ramifications of Obamacare would provide fodder for Republican efforts to repeal the landmark healthcare law now that they're set to assume total control of Congress.
“I don't think they need anything else to play into their repeal efforts,” Schumer said, suggesting that the healthcare law has lost much of its political salience with the average voter. “It has much less weight than it used to. They've moved on to other issues by and large.”
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