The professoriate, as seen through the eyes of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), thinks that Obamacare is wildly popular despite GOP efforts to make it unpopular. “Likewise, it seems not to have been enough that the Far Right extremists in the House have voted forty-one times to repeal the ACA [Affordable Care Act),” Martin Kich [1] writes on the Academe blog maintained by the AAUP. “In addition, they have publicly campaigned to convince GOP-dominated states to decline to establish insurance exchanges and to convince young Americans to refuse to sign up for the insurance coverage newly available through such exchanges.”
Kich teaches at Wright State in Ohio. “Now they are launching a formal investigation into the problems with the ACA information sites, which have proven to be so in demand that some of them have repeatedly crashed under the heavy digital traffic,” Kich avers. “Yes, that’s right, the people who have done everything in their power to make the ACA unpopular are now formally going to investigate why its administrators did not anticipate just how immediately popular it would be.”
Kich gives the Republican Party far more credit for savvy public relations and political finesse than it has ever demonstrated. Moreover, the unpopularity of Obamacare has grown since its passage, not only among rock-ribbed Republicans but with deep-pocket Democrats as well.
This can be seen in the staggering number of companies, associations and even school districts which have sought, and received waivers exempting them from Obamacare’s provisions. U. S. Representative Lynn Jenkins, R-Kansas, had her staff compile a list [2] of these waivers, courtesy of a request from the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which grants them.
The waivers run to over a thousand and are clustered in Democratic strongholds. “Do you just need to know (Democrat) people in high places?” Rep. Jenkins asks on her website. “One of the chief architects of the Obamacare package was Former-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, yet, at 51, her district has received the most waivers of any Congressional district in the country.” Apparently the waiver recipients didn’t want to wait until the bill passed to see what’s in it.
Similarly, Kich should not take heavy digital traffic as a sign of the affection Americans have for Obamacare. “One reader asked me to share his story,” Michelle Malkin [3] recounts. “Like me and 22 million other citizens in the private individual market for health insurance, he recently received his You Can’t Keep It cancellation notice.”
“I live in New Jersey, but work for a small company based out of Massachusetts,” Malkin’s reader recollected. “For years, we were all insured through the company from a plan that originated in Massachusetts.”
“However, as soon as Obamacare was passed, we were ‘audited’ by the insurance company, and it turns out only 50 percent of our company is based in Massachusetts, and therefore we did not qualify as a company under the law. Apparently, you need 51 percent based in the state. About five days prior to our insurance policy renewal, we were told we could not (renew), and I had to scramble to purchase a much more expensive individual policy with much higher costs.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia [4].
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org [5].