Many identified the concessions made to Big Pharma, the insurance companies, and the rest of the health industrial complex with the extraordinarily unpopular bailouts of the big financial institutions that inaugurated the Obama presidency. Second, the corporatist deal-making that helped give birth to Obamacare continued to impact the program throughout its short history. “So I think you find a reluctance on the part of people, even though the law is benefiting them, to publicly acknowledge it,” said Beshear. In Kentucky, observed the former Democratic Governor Steven Beshear, “demonizing the phrase Obamacare” created such toxicity that the ACA had to fly under the label Keynet, a home-grown moniker that backers kept carefully divorced from the president’s signature program. And in an era of intense partisanship, such labeling was enough to divorce the actual social and economic impact of the scheme from the political allegiances one might expect it to generate, certainly among those who proposed to preserve and expand it. GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell successfully made this expansion of the welfare state an utterly partisan phenomenon. First, Obamacare was thoroughly politicized by its opponents from day one. welfare state in nearly half a century, fail to win over a constituency commensurate with the impressive transformation it made in American healthcare provision? How did the Republicans get their chance? Why did this health insurance plan, the first substantial expansion of the U.S.
Whether all this will amount to a rapid collapse of the ACA, especially the exchanges, or a more protracted devolution and defunding remains the only question.
But despite some GOP wavering, it seems likely that after seven years of intransigent hostility to Obamacare, Republicans can maintain the discipline and momentum necessary to deregulate the insurance industry, curtail Medicaid expansion, and slash subsidies to those of modest income buying policies on the state insurance exchanges. Democrats have mobilized themselves to resist, GOP Congressmen face angry constituents at town hall meetings, and popular support for the ACA is actually inching upward. It is hard to destroy a program that has expanded medical insurance coverage to 20 million citizens, regulated health provision for tens of millions more, and materially transformed the entire medical-hospital industry. Republicans, both of the Trump variety and otherwise, are finding that efforts to “repeal and replace” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) are proving legislatively complex and politically fraught.
#Obama spent money on obamacare congress had not authorized full
To get your copy-and a full year of Dissent at 20% off- subscribe now. This article is a teaser from our Spring issue, out in just a few weeks. welfare state in nearly half a century-fail to win over the constituency it deserved? Nelson Lichtenstein ▪ Spring 2017Īt a rally to Save the ACA, San Francisco, Janu(Tom Hilton / Flickr) Why did the ACA-the first substantial expansion of the U.S.
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