Democrats’ Empty Obamacare Fix-It Strategy

Democrats can’t run on Obamacare. And they can’t
run on repealing it. So they’ve settled on a middle ground—keep
Obamacare, but fix it!

The problem is that most of the Democrats running on fixing
Obamacare have little if anything to say about how they would fix
it. And the few tweaks they have proposed wouldn’t fundamentally
change the law, or what people dislike about it. It’s a sort of
turnabout for Democrats who have long complained about the GOP’s
shallow health policy.

You can see how well the fix-it strategy worked for Florida
congressional candidate Alex Sink, who, despite better funding,
name recognition, and an early lead, lost to a trouble-plagued
Republican campaign by lobbyist David Jolly. The race was
about more than Obamacare, but Jolly hit Sink with ads bashing her
for supporting the health law, and Sink, who wasn’t in Congress
when the law passed, responded by distancing herself from President
Obama’s implementation and promising to fix what
was broken about the law. How? That was never quite clear.

Embattled Democratic senator Mary Landrieu, who is facing an

extremely tough race in Louisiana, is taking a
similar approach with her ad campaign. Landrieu at least has a
fix in mind—a bill she sponsored to let people with cancelled
individual insurance coverage keep their plans. But it’s basically
been made moot by President Obama’s
administrative tweaks to the same effect. And it wouldn’t solve
the law’s more enduring political problems; opposition to Obamacare
predates last year’s wave of plan cancellations.

Even if Democrats wanted to go further, what could they do? As
the Washington Examiner’s Byron York
argued recently, the more meaningful the changes, the more
those changes undermine the law. This is a problem that is already
plaguing the administration, which has attempted to
salvage the law’s short-term political prospects in ways that
are likely to undermine its policy mechanisms—and thus, eventually,
create longer term political headaches. Indeed, the
administration’s run of tweaks suggests the limits of the fix-it
strategy: Despite a series of highly political alterations to the
law, approval remains shaky. 

The faux fix-it campaign turns the tables on Democrats, who have
(not entirely unreasonably) made much out of the GOP’s lack of
alternative health policy solutions. Now it is Democrats who have
no meaningful alternative to their own unpopular law. They are
hoping that since some polls show more of the public would rather
fix the law than repeal it, this will pay off. But in some ways
that puts Democrats in a worse place than their opponents. The
public may not be happy with the Republican Party’s unwillingness
to propose a replacement, but at least there’s the possibility that
one will emerge, and be acceptable, at some point in the future.
The public knows full well what Democrats support, however, and
they have been consistently clear that they do not like it.

Fundamentally, what Democrats are hoping is that opposition to
Obamacare is only surface-level fixation. But years of steady
opposition, and rough poll numbers following the rollout of what
were supposed to be the law’s biggest and more crowd-pleasing
benefits, make that a tough proposition to support. Despite endless
predictions that a shift was right around the corner—just as soon
as the public found out about the law’s benefits—public disapproval
of the health law has remained strong.

Partisans are now advising Democrats to more fully embrace
Obamacare, in hopes that a more aggressive strategy will work where
the timid fix-it dance has failed. But that only shows how few
options the party has with regard to the law, for it amounts to
little more than the continued hope that public opinion on the law
will flip, and that what is now a liability for Democrats in tight
races will somehow become a help. Embracing Obamacare would require
Democrats to talk about Obamacare, but years of
unsuccessful messaging reboots have proven that they have no
idea how to do that in a way that moves people to like it.

The fix-it line is not a meaningful campaign to fix the health
law, it’s a messaging strategy designed to help struggling
Democrats defend themselves in the face of an unpopular law. But
Obamacare’s problems are not a messaging problems. They are policy
problem. And despite their desperate insistence that the law can be
fixed, if you only give them one more shot, Democrats have no real
policy fixes to offer.