When it comes to disingenuousness in re the GOP’s efforts to kill Obamacare, it’s hard to top the president, who at last Friday’s presser said their “holy grail is to make sure that 30 million Americans don’t have health insurance.” Garance Franke-Ruta, writing at The Atlantic, came close, diagnosing the “Republican obsession” with repealing the law as a form of neurosis akin to obsessive-compulsion disorder.
It is fascinating that the left is now dispensing psychological advice to the right, when they and the president have been in denial since the midterm elections of 2010, when the American people spoke with a single voice and said, “We don’t want your health care law.” And the public has been saying it with increasing volume and fervor ever since.
An Urban Institute study released last week revealed that 13.7 million Americans complain that they are being forced to purchase health insurance against their will. That’s 45% of the 30 million Obama claims the GOP wants to cast into the wilderness.
The polls have been unanimous as well, with the percentages of respondents who want the law repealed steadily rising. A CBS poll released July 24 found that 39% of Americans want Congress to repeal the law, its highest polling number ever — and CBS is low man on the totem poll. The Real Clear Politics aggregate as of July 23 showed 51% in favor of repeal, 43.3% opposed. If the question were put to a public referendum, the law would be repealed by a plurality equal to 7.7%.
That is not of course how our laws work by and large. But in a democratic republic, these realities should certainly be sufficient to delay implementation of the law. At the very least it should be enough to get the president for once to lose the snark and melodrama and deal with the fact he’s got an albatross around his neck.
But he and his radical-left base are trying to run out the clock till Oct. 1, when the individual mandate kicks in. They are counting on the strong possibility that once Americans become hooked on “hopium,” they will hate the law less. They are probably right. But it is still one hell of a way to run a government.
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