Abolish Obamacare
When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, passed in 2010, it wasn’t because anyone thought it was a particularly good idea. It was just the plan that was left after most of the parts that would make various interest groups mad got sanded off. It wasn’t a good plan—it was just the plan that Congress could pass.
Obamacare was written and developed in the shadow of Hillarycare, the ’90s-era Democratic plan to expand health coverage. The main knocks on Hillarycare were that it was too complicated and too disruptive. The plan, which never received a congressional floor vote, stalled after a series of articles, attack ads, and even a flow chart displayed on the floor of Congress turned public sentiment strongly against it. In the public imagination, Hillarycare was a confusing bureaucratic mess, not a salve for America’s health care woes.
Critics also zeroed in on another point: Hillarycare would not safeguard existing health care plans. If you liked your health insurance or your doctor, you couldn’t keep your health insurance or your doctor.
What Democratic politicians and policy wonks took from this was that Hillarycare failed because it was too byzantine and too much of a headache. No one understood how it worked, and no one with health coverage wanted to jeopardize their own insurance.
So after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, they began working on a health care law that was constructed entirely defensively. They wanted something that people could easily understand, and they wanted something that wouldn’t upset existing arrangements that people liked.
That meant writing legislation that left most of the existing health care system in place. Aside from some cost changes that were used to help foot the bill for the law, Medicare, the health
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