The End Of ‘Repeal Obamacare’?

Steve Benen argues that we may have seen the last vote to repeal Obamacare.

In October, during a disastrous enrollment period, about 100,000 Americans signed up for coverage through exchange marketplaces, and an additional 400,000 took advantage of Medicaid expansion. We don’t yet have the numbers for November, but preliminary evidence suggests 100,000 consumers enrolled last month through the federal exchange alone – roughly quadruple the number from the month before – and this doesn’t include the state exchanges or Medicaid.

In other words, the political world is in the midst of a transition as it relates to the Affordable Care Act. Republicans spent much of 2013 fighting to take away Americans’ health care benefits, but it was something of an abstraction – they were benefits consumers were poised to receive but did not yet have. Next month, they’re an abstraction no more – families will have coverage they previously lacked, and well over 1 million Americans will have insurance they would otherwise lack.

It’s exactly what makes a repeal vote more dangerous than at any previous point. There’s a profound difference between “Republicans are voting to deny you a benefit you don’t yet enjoy” and “Republicans are voting to take away your health insurance and replace it with nothing.”

The former struck GOP officials as plausible; the latter is politically suicidal.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.