Fourteen years after it was adopted on a Democratic Party line vote and seven years after the late John McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down killed then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to repeal it, the Affordable Care Act?— at first derisively and now often appreciatively nicknamed Obamacare?— is popular.
How popular? According to the most recent polling from the independent health policy research firm KFF, very. While there’s still a partisan divide among the public, overall 62% of the people KFF interviewed in April gave the law favorable marks, compared to 37% who said they view it unfavorably.
Target Obamacare today, and Americans know you’re coming after the certainty that they can get health insurance, perhaps with subsidies depending on income, even if they have preexisting conditions; stay on their parents’ plans until their 26th birthday; be covered for hospitalization, childbirth, mental health and substance abuse; receive preventive screenings; and more.
Columnist Stephanie Grace
In states such as Louisiana that had the good sense to accept Medicaid expansion, you’re also coming after mostly federally funded health coverage for lower income residents that leads to earlier (and less expensive) interventions in potentially serious situations and keeps rural hospitals in business. It’s not by accident that every major state-level Republican since former Gov. Bobby Jindal?— and that includes Gov. Jeff Landry?—?has quietly accepted that it's a net plus for the state.
Not so in Washington, where House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, seems stuck in 2010, when bashing the law was still a rhetorical winner for Republicans?— or at least 2017, before they figured out that opposing it carried steep political costs.
Actually, that’s not fair.
Johnson does know that talk of undoing the health care law is now a red flag among much of the voting public. That’s obviously why he’s running away from his recorded comment from a campaign event in Pennsylvania last week: “No Obamacare.”
Johnson’s statement came in response to a direct question as he was expounding on his plans should Republicans keep control of the House and Trump be elected again. “No Obamacare?” the questioner asked. “No Obamacare,” Johnson said, clear as day.
But Johnson also said that “the ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we've got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” He later went on Fox Business News and claimed the media and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign had twisted his words by saying that “no Obamacare” in fact meant no Obamacare, and that his acknowledgment that it’s “deeply ingrained” proves the opposite.
Even if you take him at those specific words, though, that doesn’t mean his vaguely proposed “massive reform” would protect the law’s key elements.
Consider that Johnson’s comments came as he vowed that health care would “be a big part” of a “very aggressive first 100 days agenda,” for Republicans; as he talked of taking a “blowtorch” to the regulatory state that is supposedly crushing the free market in sectors including health care; and as he said that the goal is to “take government bureaucrats out of the health care equation.”
And remember that it is actually bureaucratic regulation that guarantees the benefits people have come to expect, and that the free market before Obamacare did not offer them.
So it’s absolutely fair to wonder whether Johnson’s plans would retain things that that have made people’s lives better, and whether big changes that are not cast as an outright repeal would protect the interlocking pieces that make the whole package work.
For this part, Trump said at the only presidential debate against Harris that he has only “concepts of a plan” for health care. So if he wins and gets a Congressional majority, any real policy work is likely to originate at the Capitol.?
As for the House GOP, they not only passed a repeal in 2017 but gleefully celebrated it with Trump at the White House. That was before McCain ruined their plans and Democrats took over the House majority, thanks in no small part to their failed targeting of the health care law. It seemed, at the time, that the question was asked and answered.
However Johnson tries to parse his words from last week, he just reignited the old debate?— and put Obamacare squarely on Tuesday’s ballot.