The journalist Jonathan Cohn, an ardent supporter of Obamacare, recently wrote in The New Republic that problems with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act should be an opportunity to have a serious conversation about the laws trade-offs -- the one that should have happened a while ago. Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those trade-offs back when Congress was considering the laws passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously -- and honestly -- about those trade-offs and still pass their bill. So instead, Obama assured Americans they could keep health care policies they liked. And it wasnt just Obama. One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August 2009. If you like what you have, you can keep it, said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October of the same year. Many, many Democrats promised the same thing. They had to. If they had declared openly that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and face higher premiums and deductibles -- if Obama and Democratic leaders had said that, they would not have been able to maintain party unity in support of the bill, and the Affordable Care Act would never have passed Congress.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 18:26:14 +0000
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