Here’s how GOP Obamacare hypocrisy backfires

[Demeter]

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/28/what_the_tea_party_misses_if_you_hate_obamacare_youll_really_hate_what_the_right_wants_to_do_to_social_security/

The smartest thing yet written about the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchange program is a post by Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute at his “Rortybomb” blog at Next New Deal. Konczal makes two points, each of which deserves careful pondering. The first point is that to some degree the problems with the website have been caused by the overly complicated design of Obamacare itself. Instead of being a simple, universal program like Social Security or Medicare, the Affordable Care Act system is designed as if to illustrate Steven Teles’ notion of “kludgeocracy” or needless, counterproductive complexity in public policy. By using means-testing to vary subsidies among individuals and by trying to match individuals with private insurance companies, the ACA requires far more information about people who try to sign up than do simpler public programs like Social Security and Medicare. If Congress had passed Medicare for All, the left’s preferred simple, universal alternative to the kludgeocratic ACA mess, signing up would have been a lot easier and the potential for website snafus correspondingly less.

Konczal’s second point is even more important — the worst features of Obamacare are the very features that conservatives want to impose on all federal social policy: means-testing, a major role for the states, and subsidies to private providers instead of direct public provision of health or retirement benefits. This is not surprising, because Obamacare’s models are right-wing models — the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan in the 1990s and Mitt Romney’s “Romneycare” in Massachusetts...most conservative and libertarian plans for healthcare for the elderly involve replacing Medicare with a totally new system designed along the lines of Obamacare, with similar mandates or incentives to compel the elderly to buy private health insurance from for-profit corporations.

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If you don’t like Obamacare, you should really, really hate the proposed conservative alternatives to Social Security and Medicare...Will the flaws of Obamacare really hurt the right and help center-left supporters of universal social insurance? I doubt it. To begin with, this implies a willingness of the right to acknowledge that Obamacare, in its design, is essentially a conservative program, not a traditional liberal one. But we have just been through a presidential campaign in which Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts presided over the creation of the most important model for Obamacare, rejected any comparison of Romneycare with Obamacare. What is more, instead of agreeing with Konczal that the flaws of Obamacare are shared by most conservative entitlement reform proposals, conservatives are likely simply to denounce Obamacare as “socialism” or “collectivism” while promoting their own, Obamacare-like replacements for Social Security and Medicare, with blithe indifference to their own inconsistency.

Nor are progressives likely to press the point in present or future debates. Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party — most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives — above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy. These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating Obamacare, not as an essentially conservative program that is better than nothing, but as something it is not — namely, a great victory of progressive public policy on the scale of Social Security and Medicare.

In doing so, progressive defenders of Obamacare may inadvertently be digging the graves of Social Security and Medicare.

AS THEY MAY HAVE ALREADY DONE FOR UNIVERSAL SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE, WHICH IS NOT PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE...

[DonCoquixote]

1. I hope this becomes single payer

But the fact that Americans whine about "obamacare" proves they were nto at all ready for single payer, at least on the first try.

[Doctor_J]

2. Chances are almost nil

But the fact that Americans whine about "obamacare" proves they were nto at all ready for single payer, at least on the first try

Wrong. Many of the critics of the ACA are quite ready for UHC. The president should have known that the Repukes would complain regardless. By implementing a right-wing Heritage Foundation plan, he pissed off much of his base as well, and a great many people who believed his campaign promise for a public option.