What’s Next
Healthcare reform passed the House and is headed to the President Obama’s desk. The Senate will take up the reconciliation bill on Tuesday, whereupon the Republicans will fight tooth and nail for the cornhusker kickback and against more deficit reduction and more coverage of the uninsured. Now, as President Bartlet would ask, what’s next?
What’s next is more politics. Here’s Jonathan Bernstein:
[T]he question becomes: what will the GOP run on this fall? Most of their arguments are basically knocked out by the passage of the bill; no one will care any more about reconciliation (well, no one cared about it in the first place, but it’s even less useful as time goes on). They could continue to complaint about spending and deficits (although not, I don’t think, about taxes going into effect right away but not benefits, since that won’t make much sense to most voters who don’t see it happening). Death panels and rationing and socialism and the rest? I don’t think so.
Here’s what they will do: Republicans will now run against the current health care system. Just as they blamed Barack Obama for every job lost in February and March 2009, they’re now going to blame Democrats for every insurance rate increase, every medical error, every complex insurance form, and basically anything that goes wrong with medical care or medical insurance, beginning March 22, 2010.
That’s what Democrats should be prepared for. Against it, Democrats have the list of changes that go into effect right away, and the sensible arguments that the various problems in the system weren’t caused by a bill that is only beginning to go into effect. I don’t know who wins that argument — and, of course, the effects of winning and losing that argument are only marginally important to 2010 and 2012 elections — but that’s the argument we’re about to hear. Bad things happen in health care all the time; I’ll be very, very surprised if we don’t hear conservatives blaming one of those bad things on the brand-new law some time before Easter.
Ready for it?
That sounds pretty scary, but it seems to me such arguments will be exactly as effective as the movable portion of the electorate is causally illiterate.
And while it’s true that people by and large aren’t keyed in to the fine detail of the political process—and therefore don’t necessarily have accurate perceptions of which party’s policies causally account for their favored/disfavored outcomes—people do generally have a handle on simple causality. They are unlikely to believe, genuinely, that all the healthcare system’s problems are the result of the Democrats’ healthcare bill, when they know all too well that those problems are “pre-existing.” Believing that would be like saying, “I bought this bottle of aspirin for my headache, and it gave me the headache that caused me to go buy the aspirin.”
Now you could believe something like this: “I bought this aspirin, and my headache got worse.” But the answer to that is easy: You have to take the aspirin; just buying it isn’t enough.
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It’s hard to see R’s convincing the public that future health care horror stories are the result of HCR between now and the Nov. elections. I could imagine it working for 2012 though… even though the reforms don’t go fully into effect until 2014 by 2012 people will think the Dems own the issue for better or worse. I think even by then though we will see it as ‘better.’
I’ve been in a good mood today. This constant nagging problem thats been in the back of my mind for a year has just vanished. problem solved. it’s a nice feeling.