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January 21, 2014 at 06:54 AM
(Bloomberg) — The biggest myths about the Affordable Care Act are found among conservatives who believe that the program is going to collapse on its own — indeed that the program is already collapsing. That’s simply not happening. Even in places where reform could still go badly wrong, the prospect of “repeal” has been a fantasy for some time now. The old system is gone. A flat-out repeal of Obamacare would cause chaos. It’s not going to happen.
That’s not to say that ACA supporters don’t have their myths, too. They do. And I’m confident that the biggest myth is that somewhere down the road, probably just around the bend, Obamacare is going to be a significant electoral plus for the Democrats.
I continue to think that’s absolutely wrong.
There’s very little evidence that voters total up benefits they’ve received from government and vote for the party responsible for them. Instead, to the (relatively small) extent that voters deviate from partisanship, they’re most likely to reward or punish the incumbent party based on how things are going in general, with the economy usually the biggest piece.
Moreover, we’re right now at the peak of consumer appreciation of “Obamacare” as such. A bunch of people who were frozen out of the insurance market in the past are now entering it, and all of them probably know that the ACA is why. But their numbers are going to decrease rapidly over time.
I heard a great example of that yesterday. In a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Barbara Boxer told the story of a constituent who had been refused insurance because of a pre-existing condition which was, actually, just a false positive on a test at some point. That will never happen under the new system. But no one who receives a false positive for cancer or whatever in 2016 is going to realize that their continued access to health insurance is a result of Obamacare.
