How Obama turned Obamacare into a weapon

How Obama turned Obamacare into a weapon

click link

snip

 I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting healthcare their holy grail,” he said. “Their No. 1 priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have healthcare and repealing all those benefits I just mentioned: kids staying on their parents’ plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.”

NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd called it the “most passionate defense I’ve seen from POTUS on health care law since he signed bill.”

I think that’s about right. But that observation could easily be misconstrued as a testament to Obama’s rhetorical laziness, when the reality is the law’s long implementation process pretty much assured he and other Democrats would have a hard time selling it until now.

The ongoing conservative government shutdown freakout and Obama’s seemingly newfound confidence in the ACA are two sides of the same coin. A year ago, two years ago, the law’s core benefits were abstractions. There wasn’t a lot of margin in defending them because they weren’t a part of people’s lived experiences.