Thursday, September 19, 2013

House Republicans Go to War Against Obamacare

Republicans in the House of Representatives have launched what looks like a suicide mission against the Affordable Care Act, vowing that they will allow the government to shut down on September 30 and the country to default on its debts in mid October unless Obama agrees on repeal.

Various insiders insist that this is all kabuki, and that the House leadership is just posturing for the faithful back home. I hope so. Obama can read polls, and they say most Americans would blame the Republicans for a shutdown or a default, so he is hardly likely to surrender his "signature accomplishment" in the face of a shutdown threat. He knows that Democrats gained several House seats after the last shutdown. So do the House leaders, for that matter, which is why many pundits think they don't really mean what they say.

Which brings us to the question of why so many hard-core conservatives are desperate for a health care showdown. E.J. Dionne:
But it’s also important to understand why the Republican right is so fixated on killing or delaying Obama­care before it goes into effect. Its central worry is not that the program will fail but that it will succeed. In an interview on Fox News this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) a leader of the stop-Obamacare forces, gave the game away. After ritualistically declaring that “Obamacare isn’t working,” he said this: “If we’re going to repeal it, we’ve got to do so now or it will remain with us forever.” Why? Because once the administration gets the health insurance “exchanges in place . . . the subsidies in place,” people will get “hooked on Obamacare so that it can never be unwound.” In other words, Obamacare, like Medicare and Social Security, could work well enough and improve the lives of enough people that voters will get “hooked” on it. 
The Republicans' strategy over the past 30 years has been to turn Americans against government (and taxation to fund it) by arguing that government doesn't work. So any big, public thing the government does that works is a threat to their strategy. It makes perfect sense from their point of view. But why the rest of us would put up with it is something of a mystery.

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