HEALTH CARE, DEMOCRATS BELIEVE, WILL LEAD THEM TO VICTORY IN MIDTERMS
House, gleefully cheering a vote that would take health insurance away from thousands of her constituents.”
House passage of the Obamacare repeal bill left that chamber’s Republicans in a no-win situation. They took the hard vote, but because the Senate failed to follow suit, no one can claim a victory. Now, Democrats hope to extract a price. Far from the liability that the Affordable Care Act has been in past elections, Democrats believe health care will be a key advantage heading into this fall’s midterm elections.
Though President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement has endured, Democrats accuse the Trump administration and congressional Republicans of sabotaging the health law’s insurance marketplaces through actions such as ending the requirement that most people have coverage or pay a penalty. And in the weeks before this fall’s elections, consumers are expected to learn of another wave of premium increases.
On one level, the passage of the House repeal bill was a political achievement for Republican lawmakers; after years of campaign promises, they could tell their political base that they had done what they had pledged to do, even if the Senate stumbled once the baton was handed over to that chamber.
But viewed another way, the House repeal bill amounted to a political gift to Democrats. Opponents said its enactment would have left people with pre-existing medical conditions unable to afford health coverage and would have resulted in health plans that omit benefits currently required, like maternity care and mental health services. Republicans said Democrats’ claims were exaggerated, if not false. But the bill never became law, and supporters have no way of getting real-world evidence to refute them.
All told, the House bill would have increased the number of people without health insurance by 14 million this year and by 23 million in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office estimated.
A year ago, Democrats warned that Republicans were practically begging voters to unseat them. When the repeal bill narrowly passed the House, Democratic lawmakers serenaded their Republican colleagues with, “Na nanana,nananana,heyheyhey, goodbye!”
Beyond the House repeal bill, Democrats have also developed a broader argument that Republicans have inflicted damage on health insurance markets, partly because of actions taken by the Trump administration to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Just this week, they gained an assist from an unlikely figure: Tom Price, Trump’s former secretary of health and human services, who said that ending the requirement that most people have coverage, known as the individual mandate, would increase costs for people buying insurance.
Helping the Democrats, polls have shown that the Affordable Care Act has gained in popularity since the 2016 elections. In an NBC News/wall Street Journal poll conducted last month, Democrats had an 18 percentage-point edge when people were asked which party they thought would do a better job dealing with health care.
To mark the anniversary of House passage, health care advocates are staging events across the country this week. Today, a coalition called Save My Care plans to air a television commercial that reminds viewers about the House bill and concludes with the narrator saying, “We won’t forget.”
Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, cast doubt on how much of an effect the repeal bill would have in midterm races.
“I don’t think talking about a bill that didn’t happen is particularly effective,” he said. “People punish you for things that you do successfully, not for things that never happen just because you cast a vote.”
Cole suggested that a more significant risk stemmed from Republican voters who are disappointed that their party’s lawmakers ultimately failed to repeal the health law despite years of promises. “It’s more a matter of deflating our base than enraging the other side, because they’re already pretty enraged and energetic anyway,” he said.
Then there is the question of how much health care will remain a prominent issue when last year’s repeal effort is an increasingly distant memory.
“My fear is that there’s all this salacious stuff — there’s all this focus on Russia and Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen,” said Laurel Smith, 57, a health care activist in New Jersey whose congressman, Tom Macarthur, played a pivotal role in passing the House repeal bill. “It’s easy to get distracted.”
Smith said she had previously voted for Macarthur, a Republican, but now backs his Democratic challenger, Andy Kim. Smith’s 27-year-old son, who has a chronic and uncurable disease, has been volunteering for Kim’s campaign.
Kim, a former National Security Council staff member in the Obama White House, said he wants every voter to know about Macarthur’s role, which landed him a speaking slot at the Rose Garden ceremony.
“He wasn’t just a yes vote,” Kim said. “He’s got his name on it.”
Macarthur said he was not worried.
“The reality is I didn’t come here to be a potted plant,” he said. “I came here to work on problems facing the American people, and health care costs are hurting my constituents.”