November 26, 2014
The Wall Street Journal applauded Senator Charles Schumer for saying that the Democrats made a mistake by pursuing health care reform rather than promoting economic recovery. This of course raises the obvious question, what policies exactly would Senator Schumer have put forward to promote economic recovery had the Democrats not pursued health care reform? Would there have been a much bigger stimulus with much larger deficits? Would we have had a more serious financial reform that broke up the large banks and thrown many of Schumer’s biggest campaign contributors in jail? Obviously the Democrats should have done more to promote a recovery, but it is difficult to see how anything connected with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prevented it.
Perhaps the more serious problem with Schumer’s logic, as presented by the WSJ, is the claim that the politics on the ACA were inherently bad.
“Mr. Schumer put the problem to Democrats in terms crass enough for them to understand—’only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote,’ he said, and only ‘about 5% of the electorate’ benefits from the entitlement. ‘To aim a huge change in mandate at such a small percentage of the electorate made no political sense.'”
While the uninsured at any point in time are a relatively small share of the electorate, tens of millions of people experience stretches of being uninsured over the course of a year and tens of millions more worry about this possibility. Of course many of them may not realize how they can benefit from the ACA and even many of those who do benefit (e.g. by getting insurance on the exchanges) may not know it is due to the ACA. In this respect, it is important to note that more than 4 million people leave or lose their job every month.
In a situation where one of the leading Democrats in the Senate apparently does not understand how the ACA affects a very large share of the currently insured population, it would not be surprising that the average voter does not understand either.
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