No, Republicans aren't going to move on, obviously:
When President Obama announced on Thursday that eight million Americans have now enrolled for insurance under the health-care law's exchanges, he delivered this message to Republicans: It's time to move on from the five-year Health Care War. And Republicans immediately responded with their own message -- no. "The president says that Republicans have not accepted Obamacare as settled law. He is right. Republicans cannot and will not accept this law," said House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in a statement.So anti-Obamacare absolutism is still the GOP electoral strategy. A couple of days ago, Brian York wrote that voters in this year's midterms will pass judgment on Obamacare based on whether they're benefiting from it or not:
When it comes to the politics of Obamacare, there's really only one question that matters: How many Americans are benefiting from the new health care system, and how many are hurting?But I don't believe that Republicans are trying to marshal an army of people genuinely or seemingly harmed by Obamacare to win the midterms and the 2016 elections. I think they're doing what they usually do, which is to rally a white, economically comfortable, suburban/exurban voter base against supposed outrages from which they aren't personally suffering.
... So who has, in fact, been harmed by Obamacare? The first question, of course, is what "harmed" means. But let's define it as anyone who faces higher premiums, or higher deductibles -- adding up to a total higher cost — and/or a narrower choice of hospitals, doctors and prescription drugs than they had before. For them, health care is a more expensive and troublesome proposition than it was before Obamacare....
We know more about Obamacare's beneficiaries. First there are the three million or four million low-income people added to the Medicaid rolls....
Then there are the people who receive federal subsidies to buy health coverage through Obamacare's exchanges....
Add to that young people who are now remaining on their parents' coverage until age 26, the ... people who were in the past denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, and others who in some way have a better deal under the new system, and you have the universe of Obamacare's beneficiaries.
How does that compare to the number of people who have gotten a bad deal from Obamacare? It's impossible to know right now, and that makes it impossible to make much of a political calculation.
... Will people who pay more, or who get less, or both, take their Obamacare unhappiness out against Democrats this November? Some surely will. But how many, and how strongly motivated they will be, will probably remain unknown until after the polls have closed....
The GOP standard operating procedure is to get people in zero-crime suburbs worked up about urban gangbangers, to get people in 99% white Christian neighborhoods infuriated about imminent sharia law or the War on Christmas, to get people who live under all-GOP governments angry about ACORN and Democratic voter fraud. The outrages don't have to be happening at all, or may be happening in highly isolated locations or even in other countries (Free Republic is full of stories about "creeping sharia" that inevitably turn out to be from the U.K. or Continental Europe). The fact that the angry base can't actually reality-test the stories actually works to the GOP's advantage -- the base trusts the right-wing media so much that any story demonizing liberals and Democrats is automatically assumed to be true, especially when the truth of the story is unknowable.
So tossed-off allegations like this are assumed to be true:
Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) said Monday he believes the uninsured rate in his state has increased since implementation of the 2010 health care reform law.Hell, why not say that? It fits with the GOP's general "cooking the books" meme on Obamacare enrollment numbers.
"It's hard to get accurate numbers on anything," Huelskamp told his constituents at a town hall in Salina, Kan....
Meanwhile, Joan Walsh notes that House majority whip Kevin McCarthy has introduced a nasty new yardstick for measuring the success of the health care law:
McCarthy ... lists five new metrics for measuring success, including how many enrollees have actually paid, and how many didn't have insurance before. Those are old talking points, but ... McCarthy also tacks on an ugly parenthetical, asking "how many received a subsidy (raising concerns about fraud)." Brian Beutler at the New Republic calls this an effort to "welfarize Obamacare," to stigmatize it and also make it subject to the same hysteria about "fraud" that conservatives use to smear other social programs.See? There doesn't actually have to be any fraud. The base will just be outraged at the fraud that surely must be happening!
So, yeah, Republicans are going to keep fighting the evils of Obamacare -- regardless of whether those evils exist. For the party's base, they're just going to continue to create a reality.
