With the implementation of Obamacare soon to really begin in earnest, some conservatives have begun preemptively crowing over what they’re convinced will be a disastrous transition period. Considering they’ve spent the past three years gumming up the bureaucratic works as much as possible, they very well may be right.
But even if they aren’t, the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman worries that the bedtime story liberals tell themselves about Obamacare, that it will soon be just as beloved by the masses as Medicare and Social Security are today — and that Republicans will consequently shy from attacking it head-on — is going to look foolish in hindsight:
One of the biggest problems…is that Obamacare isn’t a single program like Medicare that people can come to love. It’s a whole bunch of pilot programs and new regulations, many of which involve private insurance or existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and when people are affected by those changes they won’t necessarily see them as being part of Obamacare…Your relationship with the insurer you choose will certainly be affected deeply by the ACA’s regulations, but most people still won’t understand exactly how.
Among the consequences are that Republicans will be absolutely free to continue to blame every problem anyone has with the health care system on Obamacare, without concern of producing a backlash from the law’s supporters. Compare that to how they talk about Medicare, a program they’ve hated since the moment it was proposed. Because they know how much seniors love their Medicare, they have to pretend they would never harm a hair on the program’s lil’ ole head…
That ridiculous kabuki Republicans are forced into is what protects Medicare from the shivs they’d love to jam into its hide. But nobody is going to shout, “Take your hands off my Obamacare!” because Obamacare isn’t going to be perceived as a thing you have. It’s just a bunch of rules governing how other things run.
I recall this argument being raised a few years ago, back when wild supposition about a bill years away from implementation was still cool. I thought it was probably right then, and still think so now.
It’s certainly a fact of American politics that the public, by and large, has no idea idea how much and what their government does. And when you’ve got a program like Obamacare, one that in so many ways embodies what is called the submerged state, a disconnect between what the public gets and what it thinks it gets — and why! — is highly likely if not outright inevitable.
So let’s stipulate that the public will never conceive of a thing called Obamacare, that Obamacare is a panoply of changes, most of them bureaucratic, that will improve people’s lives to a degree almost inverse to its presence in their consciousness. Next question is easy: why did Democrats put so much at stake for a bill that, just on the political level, is kinda-sorta terrible?
Well, this is where ideology comes in — particularly the fact that America remains very much enthralled to the ideology behind the free market. I know a lot of true-blue market absolutists would find conflating Obamacare with the free market risible; but that’s a product of temporal partisan bickering rather than a true philosophical divide. And while more than a few liberals went overboard, it’s still true that, fundamentally, Obamacare is patterned off of center-right proposals.
Living as we are in a time when, at least among elites, free-market dogma seems immune to the intellectual disfavor you’d expect after the worst financial crisis in 80 years, the prospects for progressive legislation that doesn’t take the form of the submerged state are simply lousy.
To put it simply, what chances could a less market-oriented, more statist plan truly have in an environment where Obamacare, a consummately neoliberal (i.e., liberal ends through conservative means) bill is fast-transformed into the trojan horse with a panel of Dr. Kevorkians inside? Until that question seems like an outlandish, Cassandra-esque hypothetical, the submerged state is probably the best liberals can hope to get.
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