Liberals’ Latest Attempt to Resuscitate Obamacare
Last week, the liberal messaging group Herndon Alliance released a series of talking points and poll results that are intended to make Obamacare more palatable (or perhaps less un-palatable) to voters. The full memo can be found here, but it’s interesting to highlight some of the arguments and spin that supporters of the law are resorting to in an attempt to generate public support:
- Medicare: The memo encourages liberals to claim the law “cuts waste from Medicare.” Above and beyond Nancy Pelosi’s stunning admission last year that Democrats “took a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare in [Obamacare], the health care bill” to pay for more federal spending, the fact remains that, according to the non-partisan Medicare actuary, the law will cause 40 percent of hospitals and medical providers to become unprofitable in the long term. Do liberals really want to claim that driving up to 40 percent of all medical providers out of business constitutes cutting “waste?”
- Federal Spending: The memo notes that “it wasn’t the individual mandate or higher premiums that raised the most concern, but rather that the law would burden taxpayers and the nation’s budget with another trillion dollars of government spending.” Unfortunately for the law’s supporters, in reality Obamacare doesn’t spend just $1 trillion; it spends $2.5 trillion in its first ten years alone. And even Democrats have admitted as much.
- Giveaways to Insurers: The memo claims that the law “holds insurance companies accountable,” and that “opponents of the law are siding with the insurance companies that donate to their campaigns. Some may find this claim a bit rich – $1 trillion rich, in fact – since a Bloomberg study released last week found that insurers stand to gain $1 trillion in new revenue thanks to Obamacare.
- Ending Medicare: The memo attempts to inoculate the law from attacks by claiming that Republicans would “end Medicare as we know it.” In reality, Medicare is ending Medicare as we know it; the President’s then-Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, said in July that Medicare “will run out of money in five years if we don’t do something.” And it’s Obamacare that created a new board of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats empowered to make binding rulings on how to reduce Medicare spending.
- IPAB: The memo attempts to frame the law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board – 15 bureaucrats given the reins over Medicare spending – as a “taxpayer protection board.” Well, if that’s the case, why hasn’t President Obama nominated anyone to the IPAB – does he not want to protect taxpayers? What is the Administration trying to hide during the President’s re-election campaign?
- Tax Credits: The memo claims that “the law will give small businesses more control by giving them tax credits to help them purchase insurance.” But that’s not what the non-partisan Government Accountability Office concluded just this week – it said Obamacare was giving small businesses bureaucratic headaches, because the tax credits were so paltry and difficult to claim that most firms decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
- Members of Congress: The memo claims that the law “requires that Members of Congress get their health care coverage from the same plans as millions of Americans.” But according to the Medicare actuary, most of the growth in insurance coverage under the law will come from an expansion of Medicaid. And that program is so bad that not a single Democrat voted to place themselves in Medicaid when given an opportunity to do so back in 2010.
That said, the memo does include a few gems of candor. It admits that “most polling shows that voters are much more likely to believe that [Obamacare] will increase healthcare costs rather than lower them.” (File that under “No Kidding.”) And then there’s this paragraph on the individual mandate:
Although the individual mandate is certainly opposed by voters, our research shows that it is less of a concern to them than other aspects of the law, such as the trillion dollar price tag, the potential for higher premiums and the cuts to Medicare. That said, the individual mandate was the one aspect of [Obamacare] where none of our responses outperformed the attack. While the mandate may not be driving concern over the [law], voters clearly have a hard time being persuaded of its merits.
As we’ve previously noted, some may find these continued attempts to muster enthusiasm for an unpopular law an exercise in futility. The fact that supporters of the law have been forced to rely on stale arguments so easily rebutted demonstrates that it’s not the messaging that’s the problem with Obamacare – it’s the law the left is trying to message.