Obamacares lasting legacy: For all its flaws, the greatest Democratic accomplishment since...
SATURDAY, JUL 1, 2017 09:00 AM EDT
Obamacare’s lasting legacy: For all its flaws, the greatest Democratic accomplishment since the days of LBJ and FDR
There's plenty to criticize in Obama's signature legislation — but there's a reason Republicans can't get past it
MATTHEW ROZSA
If nothing else, the Republicans’ repeated failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act – colloquially known as Obamacare — is a testament to the fact that, for the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrats had a president who was able to pass successful and lasting progressive legislation.
If Americans are going to understand the dilemma in which the GOP currently finds itself, it will thus be helpful for left-wing Democrats to learn from what Obama and other productive Democratic presidents like him have done right.
This isn’t to say that the ACA is a perfect bill. As Steven Rosenfeld of AlterNet pointed out in 2015, “Obamacare is not the long-sought dream of universal health care — a right, not a privilege or a profit center.” Like most major domestic legislation, the ACA is a complex behemoth of a law, and as a result it is easy for those inclined to criticize it to find faults that justify their preconceptions.
Yet the bottom line is that America is a better place to live because the ACA was passed. It has expanded insurance coverage to roughly 20 million Americans, lowered costs for the 57 million Americans who use Medicare and made it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions or increase charges for the sick. There are literally millions of people whose lives have been improved, and almost certainly lengthened, because of the law passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama in 2010.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/07/01/obamacares-lasting-legacy-for-all-its-flaws-the-greatest-democratic-accomplishment-since-the-days-of-lbj-and-fdr/