The GOP's Broken Message on Obamacare

Here in Virginia - as in many states across the country - Republicans are obsessed with repealing Obamacare.  Of course, they have no policy as to what they would replace it with other than to throw millions off of insurance and return visits to emergency rooms as the only source of medical care for countless Americans.   While repeal of Obamacare remains the mantra of the delusional and, in many cases, racist GOP base, something is happening that may sink the GOP's plan to capture both houses of Congress simply by running on repeal of the law: more and more Americans want the law fixed, not repealed.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon and the wrench it may throw into the GOP's playbook for 2014.  Here are excerpts:

It was supposed to be so easy this election year for Republican congressional candidates. All they would have to do was shout “repeal Obamacare!” and make a crack about government doctors and broken websites, and they could coast into office on a wave of public fury. The failure of the Affordable Care Act was simply assumed.

But it has not quite worked out that way. The government website was fixed, and 8.1 million people managed to sign up for insurance through the exchanges. An additional 4.8 million people received coverage through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Three million people under the age of 26 were covered by their parents’ plans. Though the law itself has never been widely popular, most people say they like its component parts, and a large majority now says it wants the law improved rather than repealed.

That sentiment conflicts with the Republican playbook, which party leaders are suddenly trying to rewrite. The result has been an incoherent mishmash of positions, as candidates try to straddle a widening gap between blind hatred of health reform and the public’s growing recognition that much of it is working.

Sometimes the dissonance reaches nearly comic levels. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, recently won his party’s primary for his Kentucky Senate seat in part by saying he wanted to repeal the health law “root and branch.” Last week, though, he was asked what repeal would mean for the 413,000 people who had signed up for insurance under Kynect, Kentucky’s state-run exchange. “I think that’s unconnected to my comments about the overall question,” he said. Mr. McConnell knows full well, of course, that the popular Kynect program was created by the Affordable Care Act and could not exist without it, but he is hoping to fool his constituents into believing the health care access they like has nothing to do with the law he has fought against for so long or with President Obama.

Many other Republican candidates have also switched from brimstone to mush on the issue, no longer claiming they will repeal the law but instead will “replace” it or “fix” it in some unspecified way that could not possibly work.

Richard Tisei, a Republican running for a Massachusetts congressional seat . . . . wants to instill free-market solutions,” the ad says, “end the job-killing tax on medical devices and curb lawsuit abuse to bring down the cost of care.” None of which has anything to do with bringing care to the uninsured, or those with pre-existing conditions.

The good news is that some Democratic candidates, sensing the same change in the weather, are beginning to campaign on the law’s benefits. Improving access to health care was the right thing for the country, and supporting it may turn out to be good politics, too.

I continue to believe that to be a Republican nowadays, one has to be incredibly stupid - which does apply to much of the party base - a flaming racist, a religious extremist, or a greed driven individual who cannot see that when all of society is better off, most likely, they will be too.