It seems it isn’t just the Republican Party that has come out swinging against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise colloquially known as Obamacare, as a high-ranking Democrat has criticized the healthcare reform initiative.
New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, who voted for Obamacare and other health reform legislation promoted by President Obama, spoke Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington about the Democrats’ losses in this year’s elections and noted that the party shouldn’t have attempted to reform healthcare and pass the law in 2010.
Instead, according to Schumer, the Democratic Party should have directly aided the middle class when they had full control of Washington in 2008 – White House, Senate and House.
“Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem,” said the third most powerful Democrat in the Senate. “The plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships created by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed. But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs — not changes in health care.”
Schumer further added that Obamacare was directly targeting 36 million Americans, a third of which, according to the longtime senator, are registered to vote. If these individuals moved ahead with the rate then it would have only mattered by about five percent. To Schumer, this “didn’t make any sense” and made the middle class feel that the Democrats weren’t paying any attention to them.
“Even though health care had very real benefits, it did for a small slice of the country,” Schumer posited. “There were even some policies that would help constituencies in the middle class, but not a great deal of people. Those policies should be considered, but shouldn’t be the core of the Democratic platform.”
At the same time, Schumer criticized the GOP’s scheme, including rolling back the medical device tax, something that the New York senator believes is only a short-term fix and is based on special interests.
In the end, Schumer averred that the Democrats should embrace government because the American people aren’t anti-government, but prefer to have the federal government on their side.
Schumer is receiving a wave of criticism from former Obama administration officials. Politico reports that Tommy Vietor, a former spokesperson for the president, sardonically said, “Shorter Chuck Schumer — I wish Obama cared more about helping Democrats than sick people.” Meanwhile, former Obama speech writer Jon Favreau claimed that Schumer never gave this advice while he was “championing the Affordable Care Act in 2010.”
To be fair, Schumer did propose a number of revisions to Obamacare in 2009, including ensuring that government-run health insurance programs meet the standards applied to private insurance and to combat fears that a public program would hurt private insurers which would take them out of the market.
The liberal policymaker recommended that the Democrats should push ahead with progressive taxes, making college affordable, greater spending on infrastructure and adjusting labor laws.