If you hear a ticking sound, it isn’t the “60 Minutes” clock. November 30th could be the watershed day when a portion of the bleeding of the Affordable Care Act halts, or there’s a massive political hemorrhage.
Will the shockingly inept official sign-up website work or not? If it isn’t, expect to see more than the trickle of political obituaries now being written for President Barack Obama and Obamacare — and expect to see some supporters flee for cover. NBC’s First Read puts it into perspective:
*** Twelve days to go: Health care isn’t today’s most intriguing political story of the day (that honor goes to spat inside the Cheney family), but it remains the most important political story — given all the stakes for President Obama and congressional Democrats up in 2014. When the going gets tough in politics, the first human instinct is to flee. And that’s particularly true for the always-antsy Democrats (just see 1994 and 2010). But the problem when politicians start jumping ship from their party and president, they only make things worse. Strikingly for Democrats, Friday’s House vote on the Upton bill could have been MUCH WORSE. While 39 Democrats broke ranks and supported the GOP bill, that was a far smaller number than the White House had been bracing for. More than anything else, that party unity — as fragile as it might be — bought the White House additional time to get to that self-imposed Nov. 30deadline to fix the website. But as we’ve said a million times these last few weeks, it all comes down to that website. In fact, going forward, there’s little point in covering the bits and pieces regarding the health-care law until Nov. 30. Everything right now comes down to meeting that deadline. Fail to meet that deadline and the survival-of-the-fittest instinct that every politician feels when they run for office will kick in, even if it’s bad national politics.
How bad could it get? The National Journal’s By Josh Kraushaar says the program is on life support and if things don’t get better Democrats could seek the program’s repeal. If that occurred, it would put Obama in a very special class with historians and doom serious health care reform for possibly decades:
There’s nothing that Democrats want more than to change the subject from Obamacare, despite DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s protestations otherwise. Congressional Democrats don’t want to be dealing with a drip-drip of news about premiums going up, patients losing their doctors, and a broken health care website as they face angry voters in 2014. Hillary Clinton doesn’t want this issue lingering past the midterms. She hitched her presidential prospects to President Obama’s wagon and she’s not about to let someone else’s crisis damage her presidential ambitions yet again, Even Vice President Joe Biden, who called the health care law a “big f—ing deal,” didn’t mention it once at a fundraiser last week for North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan.
Unless the HealthCare.gov website miraculously gets fixed by next month, there’s a growing likelihood that over time, enough Democrats may join Republicans to decide to start over and scrap the whole complex health care enterprise. That became clear when even Obama, to stop the political bleeding, offered an administrative fix that threatened the viability of the entire individual exchange market to forestall a House Democratic mutiny the next day. It was as clear sign as any that the president is pessimistic about the odds that the federal exchange website will be ready by the end of the month, as promised.
More than anything, politics is about self-preservation, and the last two weeks provided numerous examples of how public opinion has turned so hard against the law that even its most ardent supporters are running for the hills. It’s not just red-state Democrats, like Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, distancing themselves from the law. It’s blue-state senators like Oregon’s Jeff Merkley and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen — and top blue-state recruits like Michigan’s Gary Peters and Iowa’s Bruce Braley, who voted for GOP legislation Friday that the White House said would “gut” the law. Nearly every House Democrat in a competitive district joined with Republicans to threaten the law. Without a quick fix, those ranks will grow.
This tsunami of blowback, which built in just the last month, is unsustainable for Democrats over the long haul. The president isn’t just losing his skeptics from the chaotic Obamacare rollout but his allies who stood to gain from the law’s benefits — namely Hispanics, whose approval of the president has dropped more than any demographic subgroup since the problems began….
He notes that even among Democrats in Congress, there is less inclination to trust the White House and concludes:
If the administration can’t fix the myriad problems ailing the health care exchange website, and more sob stories emerge about people losing or paying significantly more for their insurance, it’s an unsustainable formula for Democrats. There’s not much time left on the election clock to turn things around. They’ve shown unfailing loyalty to the president, but unless he manages an unlikely fourth quarter comeback, those bonds could break — and the results could get ugly.
The bottom line is: when health care reform was being voted on who among the Democrats or even the Obama administration’s fiercest, most partisan, most lock-step-hack partisan critics would have seriously thought that when the law was enacted the website upon which it hinged would not work and be a disaster?
And who during the two Presidential campaigns who didn’t watch lock-step partisan Fox News or listen to talk show hosts believed given Barack Obama’s and the Democrats assertions how the plan would work that million would lose their insurance?
The answers are that almost none and few.
There was an assumption of basic competency in getting a website ready that was so vital. Almost an underlying believe that there was NO WAY the mechanics to sign up would not work.
And there was a fundamental trust in Obama as a man of passion who was accurately defending and explaining his signature plan and you didn’t have to hire a lawyer to see if there was a little loophole in his assertions.
So the clock is ticking.
And if time runs out and there’s no change?
Remember what they said about Humpty Dumpty…..
For more reaction from blogs go HERE.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.