With the colossal faceplant of the Obamacare rollout and the insidious nature of the law and its authors exposed through the broken promises of forced cancellations and steeply rising premiums, the left has tied itself in knots to blame the Republicans for a law exactly zero of them voted for. Various tactics have emerged, but the two most prominent (and paradoxical) are 1) blaming Romneycare (and thus all Republicans) for the individual mandate and 2) blaming Republicans for not trying hard enough to participate in the process.
In his almost taunting opinion piece Thursday, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green chose the latter, berating conservatives’ “desperate, doomed, Haily Mary” attempt at intervening in America’s impending collision with the inevitable Obamacare trainwreck and challenging Republicans to face America’s new healthcare reality and finally start offering up an alternative of their own.
On Jan. 1, the moment arrived that conservatives had been dreading: Obamacare took effect. Last year’s Republican freakout and government shutdown was a desperate, doomed, Hail Mary attempt to stave this off. It failed, and now a number of important changes have taken place: Insurance companies can’t deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charge them higher rates. There’s a limit to how much they can charge the elderly. Kids can stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26. Millions of people—nobody’s sure yet how many millions—now have health insurance because of Obamacare. This unalterably changes the political landscape, even if a lot of Republicans haven’t yet come to terms with that fact.
Green lampoons the Republicans two failed strategies for halting Obamacare. The first he claims was not participating in shaping the (glaringly ill-conceived) policy (with of course no reference to the hostility of the Pelosi and Reid-led Congress) and, instead, attempting to “oppose and obstruct the bill at every turn in hopes of killing it.” What else do you do with a fundamentally flawed law? The second was defeating Obama in 2012, a strategy Green feels the need to remind us “ultimately failed.”
As is always the case in these Republican-obstructionist arguments, Green does not mention the Democrats boxing Republicans out of key decision-making moments and dismissing off-hand any Republican alternatives to the glaringly ill-conceived healthcare law—the same law that Pelosi and company exhausted every cheap legislative trick in the book to ram through. Green also fails to mention the Obama administration’s admission that conservatives’ call for delaying the individual mandate was far more reasonable than the administration's initial attempt to force Americans to purchase a product that they’d made virtually unpurchasable.
Green finishes the piece by laying down the gauntlet, insisting Republicans accept the new Obamacare reality (Which one? The one before the delayed business and individual mandates or after?) and get into the process of reshaping the law:
The likelihood that Obamacare’s woes boost the odds that Republicans can win back the Senate in November will only add to the difficulty of accepting how much things changed on Jan. 1. But they have changed, so Republicans must pass through what theWashington Post’s Greg Sargent calls the “stages of Obamacare acceptance.” Unless and until they coalesce around an alternative, Obamacare is secure from their attacks.
If by “alternative” Green truly means a replacement that empowers the free market and not just a taming of the socialist leviathan, then sure. If not, he’s demanding the same old same old: It’s time for Republicans to get in line.
