Health care reform: The elephant in the voting booth
The most important issue of this election: Obamacare
By Ezra Klein, WashPost
According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 55 percent of registered voters say the outcome of this election will make “a great deal of difference” in their lives. That’s a 10 percent increase over the 2004 election, and more than double the percentage of voters who felt that way about the elections of 1996 or 1992. The stakes this year are higher — and most voters know it.
That’s not always the case. In fact, any given presidential election is usually less consequential than the competing campaigns suggest. Candidates have every incentive to promise you the sun, moon and stars, and so they do. But no sooner does the winner adjust his chair in the Oval Office than the White House budget director tells him they can only afford the moon and a few stars. Then the moon gets taken out by a filibuster, and the rule-writing process makes it so hard to get a star that pretty much no one ever does. And that’s a good-case scenario. The Moon, Stars and Sun Act may never even make it out of the Ways and Means Committee.
This election isn’t like that. The most important fact of the 2012 election is that the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010; it just hasn’t been fully implemented yet. If President Obama is reelected, the bulk of it will roll out on schedule in 2014.
That health care act is key because, unlike challenger Mitt Romney’s tax reform plan or Obama’s deficit-reduction plan, voters can truly count on it. If Obama is reelected, every American making less than 133 percent of the poverty line will receive Medicaid (sorry, but I don’t buy that even the reddest of states will long refuse a 9-to-1 ratio of federal-to-state Medicaid funding for very long); every American making between 133 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line will get tax credits to help buy private insurance; and there will be an expectation — reinforced by a tax penalty — that Americans who can buy quality health insurance for less than eight percent of their income will do so.
(More here.)
According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 55 percent of registered voters say the outcome of this election will make “a great deal of difference” in their lives. That’s a 10 percent increase over the 2004 election, and more than double the percentage of voters who felt that way about the elections of 1996 or 1992. The stakes this year are higher — and most voters know it.
That’s not always the case. In fact, any given presidential election is usually less consequential than the competing campaigns suggest. Candidates have every incentive to promise you the sun, moon and stars, and so they do. But no sooner does the winner adjust his chair in the Oval Office than the White House budget director tells him they can only afford the moon and a few stars. Then the moon gets taken out by a filibuster, and the rule-writing process makes it so hard to get a star that pretty much no one ever does. And that’s a good-case scenario. The Moon, Stars and Sun Act may never even make it out of the Ways and Means Committee.
This election isn’t like that. The most important fact of the 2012 election is that the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010; it just hasn’t been fully implemented yet. If President Obama is reelected, the bulk of it will roll out on schedule in 2014.
That health care act is key because, unlike challenger Mitt Romney’s tax reform plan or Obama’s deficit-reduction plan, voters can truly count on it. If Obama is reelected, every American making less than 133 percent of the poverty line will receive Medicaid (sorry, but I don’t buy that even the reddest of states will long refuse a 9-to-1 ratio of federal-to-state Medicaid funding for very long); every American making between 133 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line will get tax credits to help buy private insurance; and there will be an expectation — reinforced by a tax penalty — that Americans who can buy quality health insurance for less than eight percent of their income will do so.
(More here.)
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