An increasing number of Democrats are taking potshots at President Obama’s healthcare law ahead of a Supreme Court decision that could overturn it.
The public grievances have come from centrists and liberals and reflect rising anxiety ahead of November’s elections.
“I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare,” said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who is retiring at the end of this Congress.
Miller, who voted for the law, said the administration wasted time and political capital on healthcare reform, resulting in lingering economic problems that will continue to plague Obama’s reelection chances in 2012.
Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) also criticized his party’s handling of the issue, and said he repeatedly called on his leaders to figure out how they were going to pay for the bill, and then figure out what they could afford.
Cardoza, who like Miller will retire at the end of the Congress, said he thought the bill should have been done “in digestible pieces that the American public could understand and that we could implement.”
The most recent wave of misgivings from Democrats began with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who told New York magazine that Democrats “paid a terrible price for healthcare.”
Frank said Obama had erred in pushing the legislation after GOP Sen. Scott Brown’s January 2010 victory in Massachusetts, which took away the Senate Democrats’ 60th vote.
Most of the second-guessing has come from retiring members such as Frank and Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who this week predicted the law will be Obama’s “biggest downside” heading into the November elections. Such members can afford to be more candid in speaking their minds without offending their leadership, but are also likely to reflect the feelings of other lawmakers in the House and Senate.
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3 Responses
Well, it will eventually bankrupt the country (starting with the states), probably undermine the quality of medical care, and by transfering control of the health care system to the federal government via insurance mandates, created openings that no one anticipated (a way to either mandate contraception and punish those who don’t use it, or alternatively, a way to ban abortion indirectly).
Putting health insurance under federal control is another GSA waiting to happen. It will be a political plum job and a total waste of money. They will need to go on fact finding towards around the work to “investigate” other countries health insurance.
I am a Democrat who is critical of Obama…he came on board thinking that making nice to people and attempting to compromise with them would save the day. He tried this with Muslims…and with the increasingly right-wing Republicans shackled by the Tea Party Know Nothings…and both just spit on him…I voted for Obama, but I voted for some guts too. He should have gone with a single payer system, such as by expanding Medicare, when he had a Democrat majority…and let all of you right wing ideologues howl to your heart’s content.
The hypocrisy is mind-boggling: There is one “government-takeover” “socialist” health care system that the GOP hasn’t yet slimed with silly and horribly inaccurate slogans…Medicare. I bet those ideological hot heads who are in their 60s will happily accept their Medicare as just ducky…no “socialism” there.
Talk about hypocrisy, I mean…don’t you just love the yungeleits in major yeshivas who decry “socialized Obamacare” all the while their families are enrolled in State medical insurance assistance programs.