Three Obamacare Myths That Refuse To Die

Every time the question of Obamacare’s constitutionality comes up, we hear a lot of noise about how conservatives intend to ”strip” health care from millions of Americans, a lot about how Republicans are committing political suicide, and a lot of historical revisionism. Take these comments from David Weigel of the Washington Post, which summarize a number of Democrat talking points neatly.

“You can dream up some lawsuit against Medicare itself, sure, but every legal attack on the ACA has focused on the parts designed to make it a market-friendly compromise,” he tweeted. “This is why a lot of Dems (and Rs) think that if the hail mary Texas lawsuit succeeds — if the ACA is torn up by judges on a technicality — the ‘just fix it’ era is over. Democrats will have learned that compromise doesn’t work and run on single-payer.”

For one thing, in the end, Democrats didn’t “compromise” on Obamacare. The passing of Obamacare frayed our contemporary political order in ways from which we have yet to recover. For the first time in history, a major political party pushed through a national reform of the economy without any buy-in from half the nation. And since its passage, Democrats have demanded that Republicans help “fix it.”

Put it this way: If George W. Bush and the Republicans had used every procedural tool to unilaterally jam through partisan legislation that “privatized” the Social Security system, there would be zero expectation that Democrats should help Republicans fix it.

And no Republican could vote for Obamacare, because there’s wasn’t a single genuine conservative proposal that made it palatable (even if Democrats insist that an idea hatched in the Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s is consecrated GOP policy.) Not even moderate senators from Maine, not John McCain, not one Republican, would go for it. And these were politicians who would often cross party lines.