Year: 2013

Do Republicans believe that Obamacare is a disaster in the making? Or is it such an appealing program that they have to take extraordinary steps to undermine it? Reuters reports today that conservative groups are taking their campaign to undermine the law to ever new heights. As the Tea Party group FreedomWorks puts it: “We’re trying to make it socially acceptable to skip the exchange.” [...] At the same time they’re trying to undermine it, Republicans are loudly insisting that the program just won’t work — it will “collapse under its own weight,” as the talking point has it. For example, see the apparent attempt by Republican state governments to hype “rate shock” well beyond any reality. As Sarah Kliff argues today, Republicans have set expectations for the program so low that “if Godzilla doesn’t march in on Oct. 1 and gobble up our health insurance coverage and legions of IRS agents fail to microchip the masses, that could plausibly look like a success.” If they really believe that the Affordable Care Act will collapse on its own — that premiums will skyrocket, that people will lose what they have now, or whatever other horrors they’ve been asserting — then there’s no reason at all for any campaign to spread misinformation about the law or to encourage anyone to “skip the exchange.” Consumers would do that on their own. But Republicans apparently think they can’t take the risk that Obamacare will work out just fine.