For practically all of the Obama administration, the partisan battle lines over the Affordable Care Act were clear. Democrats love it. Republicans want to kill it. End of story, right? Not so fast, writes Peter Suderman:
More and more, Democrats have stopped defending the actual legislation as it exists on the books and in the real world. Instead, they have started arguing in favor of what might be described as a hypothetical “good parts” version of the law. They defend the idea of Obamacare, of a government-granted guarantee of affordable universal coverage, rather than the whole legislation itself.
Donald Trump’s inconsistent and often incoherent opposition to the law—he promised to repeal and replace it with some unspecified alternative—meant that Democrats did not have to respond to detailed Republican attacks on the system. Instead, pressure came from the legislation’s real-world failures. From spiking premiums to dwindling plan choice to blatantly illegal payouts, 2016 was the year that Obamacare finally became indefensible.
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