GOP’s quiet Obamacare disaster: How this week’s biggest story got overlooked

While everyone obsessed over the Bergdahl flap, the real story was revealed by a nomination hearing and new data

SIMON MALOY

Right around noon on Wednesday, the Senate voted to invoke cloture on Sylvia Mathews Burwell’s nomination to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services. The all-out Obamacare brawl that Republicans had promised when Burwell’s nomination was announced never materialized. Instead, it ended with a quiet, respectful display of bipartisan comity.

Losing the opportunity to grandstand on the Burwell nomination, however, was the least of the Republicans’ troubles this week when it came to the Affordable Care Act. We’re only six days into June, and opponents of the ACA have already had a terrible month.

The big news was the release of new data from the White House indicating that enrollment in Medicaid has surged in states that elected to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act. In April alone more than 1 million people signed up for coverage. Medicaid enrollment in states that rejected the expansion has also gone up as people who didn’t know they were eligible started signing up – the so-called Woodwork Effect. Add all those enrollees to the number of people who were on Medicaid or CHIP prior to the ACA’s implementation, and you come up with just over 65 million Americans enrolled in the program.

As Paul Waldman puts it at the Washington Post, this is game over for Republican critics of the law who insist on repealing and replacing the ACA to get government out of healthcare. To do so, they’d have to find a way to transition tens of millions of people off of their government-provided health coverage. “Even if Republicans took back the White House and both houses of Congress,” Waldman writes, “moving people off their government insurance would be next to impossible.” The fight over Obamacare was always going to be a war of attrition, and it was always stacked against the Republicans.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/06/06/gops_quiet_obamacare_disaster_how_this_weeks_biggest_story_got_overlooked/