AFFORDABLE CARE ACT IS THE LAW, GOP EFFORTS WILL ULTIMATELY FAIL
The long years of Republican obstruction and obfuscation on health care reform have taken their toll. More than half of Americans still say they don’t know how they and their families will be affected by the Affordable Care Act, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll, about the same percentage as in 2010. More Americans have a negative view of the act than a positive one.
But now the Obama administration, which has been outshouted by its opponents, is fighting back. It recently announced it will pay $67 million to more than 100 community groups and health care providers to evangelize for the program and help people navigate its complexities in preparation for the opening of health care exchanges Oct. 1. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and their spouses are preparing an extensive road trip in the next few weeks to encourage enrollment.
And Wednesday, former President Bill Clinton — described by Obama as “the secretary of explaining stuff” — was deployed to give the first in a series of speeches describing the law’s importance to public health and to those now unable to obtain or afford insurance. Speaking at his library in Little Rock, Ark., he made a forceful case.
“This does give us the best chance we have to achieve nearly universal coverage, provide higher quality health care and lower the rate of cost increases, which we have got to do in a competitive global economy,” Clinton said.
The public relations effort is desperately needed. The Republican Party has spent the last few months trying to dampen enthusiasm for enrollment with misinformation and opportunism. (House Speaker John Boehner, for example, falsely claimed the law would raise the nation’s health care costs.) The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, has promised to make it the single biggest issue in next year’s midterm elections. One presidential hopeful, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, spent his summer on a “Defund Obamacare” tour, cynically aware that it would be far more successful at bringing him name recognition and dollars than at achieving its purported defunding goal.
Many Republican governors and state lawmakers are doing everything they can to stymie the opening of exchanges, deliberately creating stumbling blocks for their own uninsured residents to get coverage. The National Football League knuckled under to Republican pressure not to help promote the law (though at least the Baltimore Ravens agreed to market Maryland’s program). Missouri, Ohio and several other states decreed that the “navigators” hired by the administration to help people understand the law must have state certification, an unnecessary requirement designed only to preserve ignorance and reduce enrollment.
In Washington, Republican members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have sent intimidating letters to many of the groups hired as navigators, demanding all their paperwork and suggesting that the groups intend to exploit the work for fundraising or political purposes. These are nonprofit groups that are simply trying to help uninsured people through the bureaucracy, and Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the committee, was right to accuse Republicans of “an abuse of your oversight authority.”
Those who oppose health care reform will keep erecting hurdles, but as Clinton said Wednesday, “it is the law,” and in less than a month, uninsured people will begin signing up for coverage. The more information they get — from the president, from the Baltimore Ravens and from the community group next door — the better their decisions will be.