Republicans’ New Anti-Obamacare Tactic: Class War

Republicans’ new anti-Obamacare tactic: Class war
Now that it seems Healthcare.gov will be fixed soon, the new anti-Obamacare plan pits young males vs seniors, sick

By Brian Beutler
Salon

(snip)

If a flood of stories about “rate shock” scare people out of browsing for plans themselves, all the better. But the real backup plan, such as it is, is to pit a thin demographic — healthy, young, middle-class, disproportionately male individuals who had cheap but crappy insurance until now and are resentful that they have to pay more — against the newly insured, and older, sicker beneficiaries who will see their costs go down, and hope the latter don’t have enough clout to prevail in a political brawl.

The right’s demographic will probably be easier to mobilize. See this L.A. Times story, or David Frum’s twitter account, for a taste of the (in some cases understandable) resentment. But it Healthcare.gov works soon, it probably won’t have the numbers. We’ve known for years that Obamacare wouldn’t be immediately beneficial to everyone’s bottom line — that it would create a new financial hardship for a small minority of consumers. But first year premiums actually came in lower than expected, which means this demographic will be smaller than anticipated. Moreover I think the right is badly underestimating how important the law is already proving to people who were uninsurable until this month. Many of them will be happily paying thousands of dollars a year more than they had been — because it costs $0.00 a month to apply for insurance and get turned down.

Either way, though, the strategy will run headlong into the GOP’s overreach problem. If Republicans were really concerned about middle class pocketbook issues, they’d argue in a limited way that Obamacare requires people of modest means to buy too much insurance. Pare down the definition of essential benefits somewhat or let more young beneficiaries purchase catastrophic plans, and the hit to their wallets wouldn’t be so severe.

But that’s not really what their game is. They want to mortally damage the law. And as such they don’t care nearly as much about the dollars people will spend because ACA-compliant insurance benefits are fairly generous as they do about the dollars people will spend because they’re cross-subsidizing the ill and the aged. And those are precisely the grounds to fight on if the goal is to get liberals to circle the wagons around Obamacare.

The rest: http://www.salon.com/2013/10/28/republicans_new_anti_obamacare_tactic_class_war/