Democrats Defect From Obamacare

Meanwhile, the GOP learns to stop worrying and love Obama’s signature legislative victory.

- Peter Suderman

FOR PRACTICALLY ALL of the Obama administration, the partisan battle lines over the Affordable Care Act were clear. Democrats love it. Republicans want to kill it. End of story, right?

But at the end of 2016, as President Barack Obama prepared to leave office and the health care law entered another open enrollment period, something unexpected happened: Democrats stopped defending Obamacare. It wasn’t despair over the law’s fate in the hands of President Trump. The trend began when Hillary Clinton was still the presumptive winner.

In October, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, complained publicly that although the health law had “many good features,” it was “no longer affordable to increasing numbers of people.” Around the same time, Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, whose determination to pass health care legislation helped push the bill over the congressional finish line in 2010, was asked on Meet the Press about the high price of health insurance premiums under the law. “Let’s see how it works, and let’s improve it,” was her response. She also noted, as she has before, that what she would really “love” is a single-payer system. Just three years before, as the law’s coverage expansion kicked in, she had touted it as a path to “more affordability, more accessibility, better-quality care, prevention, wellness, a healthier nation honoring the vows of our founders of life, a healthier life.”