“Earlier this week we learned that former Obama Administration official Elizabeth Warren is calling for a repeal of one of Obamacare’s many taxes, and today The Hill is reporting that several Democrats in Congress are starting to regret President Obama’s signature health care law. First there’s Representative Brad Miller (D-NC), who is retiring at the end of this session of Congress:”
“But it is telling that this progressive champion of higher taxes, who delivers viral mini monologues about the greatness of giving back and paying one’s corporate fair share in exchange for valuable government services, can so easily transform her Senate campaign into a vehicle for obvious industry talking points. This is one of the reasons why the cost savings schemes in the 2010 health care overhaul probably won’t work. Those provisions generally save money by either taxing someone’s benefits (specifically the sort of expensive health plans held by many union members) or reducing someone’s payments (higher payments to Medicare advantage plans).”
“President Obama’s new health-care law will be his greatest liability as he attempts to once again win the critical swing state of Virginia, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) warned Wednesday. ‘I’ll be real frank here,’ Webb said at a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News. ‘I think that the manner in which the health-care reform issue was put in front of the Congress, the way that the issue was dealt with by the White House, cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader.'”
“The most astonishing result is that while, as expected, two-thirds of Republicans want all of Obamacare struck down, about half of Democrats do not want the Court to uphold all of Obamacare. Half of Democrats do not fully support President Obama’s crowning domestic achievement, the fulfillment of a ‘century of trying’ and as Representative Clyburn put it, the 21st-century Civil Rights bill!”
“Many of its opponents were passionately convinced that ObamaCare marked an unprecedented and ominous interference by the federal government in the lives of American citizens. At the root of these fears lay the provision of the program known as the individual mandate. If the government could make us buy health insurance, or incur a penalty for failing to, what could stop it from compelling people to purchase electric cars, memberships in a health club, or, that old favorite, broccoli—indeed, anything at all?”
“A new Reason-Rupe poll finds a majority of Americans (56 percent) favor a provision in the new health care law that requires employers with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance or else pay a fine. At the same time, 58 percent of Americans expect the employer mandate to drive employers to pay their workers less, 29 percent expect no significant impact on pay. Even among those who support the provision, 50 percent expect employers to reduce pay.
Moreover, nearly half of Americans (47 percent) expect the employer mandate will lead employers to lay off workers. 39 percent think it will not significantly impact employers’ hiring decisions.”
“But the question remains: What kind of reforms do Americans want? The Obama administration completely misread the public mood when it based its decision to craft a 2,700-page, Rube Goldberg-style makeover of literally one-sixth of our economy on polls suggesting that Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes for universal coverage. Worse, a joint poll by Reason Foundation (where I work) and Rupe released this week found that the misnamed Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare — imposed trade-offs that Americans were simply unwilling to accept.”
“Republican lawmakers leaving oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed that the government will have a tough time finding a fifth justice to uphold the health law’s individual mandate. Democrats for their part found solace in pointed questioning of lawyers on both sides of the argument by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts. Their outlook coming out of the court, however, was visibly less sunny than the Republicans’.”
“It’s hard to sustain the level of indignant shock that the law rightly calls for. In just the past few weeks—looking over a couple of the statute’s provisions in relation to various writing projects on the HHS mandate and on Medicare—I have found myself shocked anew at the breadth and depth of Obamacare’s recklessness and folly, not because I didn’t know what it said before but because the passage of time inevitably dissipates the intensity of astonishment. It sometimes takes a renewed exposure to the thing itself, to the fact that it is really there in the U.S. Code, to be knocked back into the proper frame of mind.”
“The health law remains a tough sell for reasons that go beyond the drumbeat from Republicans for its repeal and questions about its constitutionality that will be debated next week at the Supreme Court. Several of the law’s early pieces, designed to win public support, haven’t worked as well in the real world as on paper and have irked even some of the Americans they were designed to help.”