The following article by James Hohman with Breanne Deppisch was posted on the Washington Post website February 9, 2017:
BALTIMORE—Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare could help Democrats do what they have been unable to for seven years: sell the American people on the benefits of the health law.
Poll numbers are moving in their direction. Grassroots organizing – from protests to town halls – is en fuego. For years, the national and local media focused on the problems with the rollout of the law. But reporters have begun writing much more, instead, about the people who stand to lose benefits they’ve obtained.
— House Democrats are using their retreat here, which started yesterday and continues through tomorrow, to strategize about how they can capitalize on Republican divisions related to the replacement of the Affordable Care Act.
“This is one of those issues where, as time goes on, it gets better for us,” said Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “We’re going to keep up stoking the fires. … I think we have tremendous leverage.”
Rep. Richard E. Neal, the top Democrat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, expects that hospitals and some companies in the private sector will give Democrats cover by publicly warning about the potential harms of repeal. “Medicaid expansion has now become a middle class benefit,” said Neal (Mass.).
Rep. Bobby Scott (Va.), the top Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, said it would have been harder to mobilize opposition to the Republican repeal drive if Speaker Paul Ryan had moved more swiftly. “We don’t want to let anyone forget what the situation was before the Affordable Care Act passed,” he said, emphasizing that women paid more for coverage than men and people with preexisting conditions couldn’t get coverage.
— “The Obamacare repeal effort was already in unstable condition. Now its status must be downgraded to critical — and completely unserious,” Dana Milbank notes in his column today. “For seven years, opponents of the Affordable Care Act vowed to make its repeal their top concern, warning that the law would turn America overnight into a socialist dystopia. Now these opponents have unfettered control of the government and they aren’t even talking about repealing.”
- In his weekend interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, Trump said that “maybe it’ll take till sometime into next year” for his administration to unveil a new health-care plan. It is, the president said, “very complicated.”
- From Capitol Hill comes new word that Republicans aren’t even talking about a plan. “To be honest, there’s not any real discussion taking place right now,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters Tuesday at the Capitol. Corker, according to the Huffington Post, said he has “no idea” when Republicans might start drafting an alternative to Obamacare, adding, “I don’t see any congealing around ideas yet.”
— Many Republican politicians are speaking pretty openly about the political danger of scaling back coverage. Lawmakers are getting nervous about facing the kind of contentious town halls that their Democratic counterparts faced in 2009. Several members have already faced big crowds of angry activists back home. “I’m not sure you’re going to have anyone in Washington with the courage to repeal the ACA,” Maine Gov. Paul LePage said at a town hall meeting last week. “I do not believe for a minute that now that we have exchanges they will take them away.”
— The tenor of press coverage has shifted dramatically since the election toward emphasizing plusses, rather than minuses, of the law. Check out these 10 headlines from just the past few days:
- McClatchy’s Washington Bureau: “Repealing Obamacare would kill millions of jobs nationwide.”
- CNBC: “Obamacare repeal could crush your retiree medical costs.”
- USA Today: “Hospitals would face higher charity costs without Obamacare.”
- Kaiser Health News (which is picked up by a lot of newspapers): “Hospitals Worry Repeal Of Obamacare Would Jeopardize Innovations In Care.”
- NPR: “Obamacare Helped The Homeless, Who Now Worry About Coverage Repeal.”
- Los Angeles Times: “Trump’s actions on Obamacare threaten to undermine insurance markets.”
- Charlotte Observer: “ACA repeal could cost Mecklenberg and North Carolina millions in health funding.”
- Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Virginia could lose $20 million in public health funds with ACA repeal.”
- Register-Herald of Beckley, West Virginia: “West Virginia to be second most affected state with ACA repeal.” Finally, the conservative-leaning Arizona Republic editorial board has been calling on the GOP to not repeal the law until there is a replacement in place.
— A coalition is using a bus tour as one vehicle to drive more local coverage like this. The “Save My Care” Tour has been going for three weeks now, leaving positive clips in its wake from Pennsylvania to Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky and Colorado. Today the bus stops in Las Vegas.
Other organized activities have generated favorable local coverage, as well, including a protest of cancer patients outside Senate health committee chairman Lamar Alexander’s Knoxville office last month. A similar event in Nevada targeted Dean Heller, the most vulnerable GOP senator up for reelection in 2018.
— Finally, there has been a subtle shift in some of the polling. Fox News has been asking routinely in its polling for seven years what should happen to the law. The percentage who want to “repeal it entirely” is at an all-time low of 23 percent in the network’s most recent survey, compared to 33 percent in 2015 and 39 percent in 2013. One-third in the new poll want to “repeal parts of the law,” while 28 percent support “expanding it” and 13 percent want to “leave it as is.”
The most recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that only 20 percent of Americans support repeal alone, while 47 percent oppose repeal altogether and another 28 percent want to wait to repeal the law until the replacement plan’s details are known. The researchers behind the nonpartisan survey relay that a surprising number of people shift their opinions when they hear counter-arguments: “For example, after hearing pro-repeal arguments about the law’s costs to individuals and the government, the share of the public supporting repeal grows as large as 60 percent, while anti-repeal arguments about people losing coverage and the impact on people with pre-existing conditions decreases support for repeal to as low as 27 percent.”
The fluidity of those numbers underscores how impactful the coming debate over repeal could be on public opinion.
Democrats think some shared principles will work to their advantage during the coming fight over the law. The newest Quinnipiac University survey, for instance, found that 96 percent of Americans, including 91 percent of Republicans, say it is “very important” or “somewhat important” that health insurance be affordable for all Americans.
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