ObamaCare has been such a mess that it appears that Democrats are beginning to bail on it.
That surfaced in a Kaiser Family Foundation survey released late last week that shows public discontent with the law that was supposed to cure most of the problems with our health care system. Investor's Business Daily reports:
When asked specifically about health care, the two top issues are the “Affordable Care Act” and “health care costs.” In other words, the biggest health care concerns people have right now are the law Obama signed, and the problem it was supposed to address.
Even Democrats are growing restive with ObamaCare, with 25% of Democrats now saying they have an unfavorable view of the law, up from 19% last month.
To be sure, a big chunk of this group (40%) wants the law expanded to cover more people (despite the fact that this is what ObamaCare itself was supposed to achieve), but 28% of these Democrats now say ObamaCare should either be repealed or scaled back.
Passing ObamaCare without input from the out of power party was an act of hubris: health care needed to be reformed, but to work it had to be both incremental and bipartisan. Instead, Democrats took advantage of a brief, shining moment when they had the presidency and both houses of Congress to ramrod an unpopular bill through Congress. Even then, it took arm-twisting, unsavory deals and unusual parliamentary maneuvers to get ObamaCare the votes it needed. Not a single Republican voted for it.
And this mess is the result. IBD adds:
The public’s view of the law is not likely to improve much when insurers start to announce their proposed rate hikes for 2017. Next year marks the end of ObamaCare’s $25 billion temporary “reinsurance” program, which was basically a subsidy scheme designed to hold down premiums in ObamaCare’s first three years.
By all accounts, now that insurers will have to price their policies to reflect the true cost of ObamaCare coverage, enrollees are in for the rate shocks of their lives. That could, in turn, cause further problems with enrollment as well as the stability and viability of the ObamaCare exchanges.
No matter who ends up in the White House next year, there is no question that ObamaCare’s compounding failures will require the next president to “take up this cause” again.
Assuming that we have not entered an entirely post-ideas epoch, there are so many good plans and proposals out there for reform health care. Will they listen this time?