Is ‘Obamacare’ a burden?

Opinion: April 4, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

Philadelphia Inquirer

An amazing moment occurred the other day on the two-year anniversary of the health-reform law that has long been burdened by the pejorative term Obamacare. The president’s campaign advisersdecuded to take ownership of the term and spin it as a positive.

So they emailed their supporters: “It’s about time we give it the love that it deserves. Let everyone know, ‘I like Obamacare.’” And President Obama himself doubled down during a fund-raiser: “You want to call it Obamacare — that’s OK, because I do care.”

Team Obama’s bid to own the term (which was coined by conservative critics as a synonym for socialist overreach) is just one facet of its broader plan to trumpet the health reform law as a re-election asset.

Swing states

The official Obama campaign video devotes more time to the law than to any other issue. Meanwhile, every day, the administration is highlighting a citizen helped by the law (for instance, a Tampa nurse who got insurance for her son because the law bars insurers from denying coverage to kids with birth defects). And it’s peppering swing states with pertinent statistics: “As of June 2011, 64,798 young adults in Pennsylvania gained insurance coverage as a result of the new health law” — thanks to the provision that allows parents to cover their otherwise uninsured kids up to age 26.

There are three reasons why Obama and his people have opted to own what has long been assumed to be a political albatross: (1) they’re confident about their re-election prospects, which have been buoyed by a slowly improving economy; (2) they know that likely challenger Mitt Romney is ill-equipped to bang them on Obamacare, because, as governor, he was the one who championed Obamacare’s antecedent; and (3) they frankly had no choice but to embrace the health law and make a virtue out of a necessity. Because if they didn’t frame the dialogue their way, the GOP would fill the vacuum.

And if the five Republican appointees on the Suprme Court strike down the law — ignoring the obvious fact that health care is interstate commerce, and ignoring previous court decisions upholding the regulation of interstate commerce — two things will happen in the political realm:

The Republicans would lose the rhetorical weapon they have wielded since the summer of 2009. Politicians like Rick Santorum will no longer be able to summon the conservative base with war cries about “the death knell of freedom.” And GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, no longer able to demand that health reform be “repealed and replaced,” would be under pressure to actually tackle the challenge of covering the uninsured and fixing the abiding inequities of the Western world’s most dysfunctional health system. (Which, for decades, they generally have been loathe to do.)

Rhetorical weapon

Meanwhile, Democrats would gain a powerful rhetorical weapon, one that would help them energize the liberal base. And they’d say to swing voters: “Obama gave you a historic reform law that barred insurers from capping your health coverage, that barred insurers from denying coverage to kids with preexisting conditions, that kept adult kids on the family coverage, and that gave financial help to many seniors who get the Medicare prescription drug benefit. But now this law has been taken away from you.”

Women, in particular, are sensitive about the health issue. Between the ages of 30 and 55, they’re usually the prime caregivers for children and parents. And they’d lose a lot if the health-reform law goes away — including the provision that bars insurers from dropping women when they get pregnant, the provision that bars insurers from charging them higher premiums than men, and the provision that requires insurers to cover mammograms and contraception without charging co-payments.

Dick Polman is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by MCT Information Services.