ObamaCare II: republicans rubber stamping Obama’s latest health care law

By Will Stabley | April 17, 2015

After six years of steadfastly fighting against President Obama on every inch of his health care reform agenda, republicans in congress have decided this week to rubber stamp a new health care law which might as well be called ObamaCare II. It expands and reforms Medicare and makes it easier for working class seniors to get coverage, while asking wealthy seniors to contribute more. It’s the kind of legislation that republican polticians generally hate, because it does nothing to help the wealthiest one percent. So why the sudden change in tone and overwhelming support for Obama’s health care agenda?

First one has to examine what this is not. It’s not a change of heart on the part of republicans in congress. They haven’t suddenly decided to begin working with the President after so many years of obstructing nearly every one of his attempts at governing. We know this because even as they’ve passed the new ObamaCare style law, they’ve continued to block all of Obama’s other actions, even holding up his new nominee for Attorney General for purely political purposes.

One theory might be that the republicans in congress have decided to go ahead and support just one of the President’s initiatives, so that when they have to run for reelection they can point to it as supposed evidence that they did try and work with him. But if that were the case they certainly wouldn’t have chosen a health care reform law as that one piece of token legislation, as their support for this pretty much ruins their ability to run on an anti-ObamaCare platform. Which is why this may in fact be just the opposite.

With more than ten million Americans having gained health care through the ACA, and the supposed horror stories about people having supposedly lost their existing insurance having turned out to he fabricated, an increasing number of voters are figuring out that ObamaCare has been an overwhelming success after all. So it may not be a coincidence that just days after Hillary Clinton has announced her nearly unbeatable campaign for President in 2016, the republican party has almost unanimously decided to rubber stamp Obama’s health care agenda.

The republicans may have concluded that the only way they can campaign on ObamaCare in 2016 is to claim they’re the ones who have been responsible for it all along, in the hopes that unknowledgeable moderate voters won’t know the difference – and that starts by supporting Obama’s new health care initiatives from here on out. Just one hiccup with that strategy: this is the point at which republicans have to be wishing they hadn’t come up with the “ObamaCare” nickname for it, as even the most clueless of voters won’t have much difficulty deducing where the credit belongs.