11-26-2014
It's easy to be offended by Chuck Schumer's claim yesterday that Obamacare was a mistake, because it favored the interests of the poor ahead of Democrats' electoral fortunes. Harder is dismissing it, because other Democrats are probably thinking the same thing: What did Obamacare gain them?
Schumer, the senior Democratic senator from New York, argued that his party should have used its mandate in 2009 to pursue something that more plainly benefited the middle class -- a group that wasn't really hurt by the dysfunction of the health-care system. By contrast, focusing on those without coverage "made no political sense," especially because "only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote."
You can quibble with the ethics of that point: Are the needs of the poor less important because they're less likely to vote? As Brian Beutler writes, you can also quibble with Schumer's premise: What other policy should Democrats have pursued first? And would it really have helped the middle class more than health-care reform, whose effects reach far beyond the poor?
But Schumer's critics risk missing the bigger concern. Obamacare has mostly been a policy success. Enrollment is high, costs are reasonable, and the sky hasn't fallen on employer-based insurance. Some people on the individual market saw their plans canceled, but for the most part it's working.
Yet the political payoff for that success has been close to zero. The problem isn't only, or even primarily, that the poor are less likely to vote; it's that Obamacare's benefits haven't translated into support for the law or the party that brought it into existence.
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