Well, it looks like the Kamikaze Kaucus has come up with a debt ceiling “compromise” – if Democrats agree to delay Obamacare for a year and acquiesce to a repeal of the medical device tax, Republicans will be kind enough to grace America with a continuing resolution. How charitable.
So we’re headed for a shutdown. Harry Reid said he won’t accept any debt ceiling compromise that includes Obamacare tweaks. Nor should he. This isn’t about overall spending, and he has the American people backing him up: A CNBC poll released a few days ago showed that a vast majority of Americans – by a margin of 3:1 – clearly oppose Congress using disputes over Obamacare to justify a government shutdown, and a plurality of Americans oppose defunding Obamacare at all.
The very fact that Republicans are seeking a delay lends credence to the theory that they loath the law because they’re terrified of it – a year long delay, from the GOP point of view, would buy the Tea Party time to kill the law, at best, and wouldn’t give Democrats much of a chance to tout Obamacare by the time midterm elections roll around, at worst.
Bolstering that theory – another CNBC poll released this week showing that Americans react less negatively to the term “Affordable Care Act” than they do in response to“Obamacare.”
But the White House has a lot of work to do if they want the public to reap the benefits of healthcare reform – a recent poll conducted for the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that most people (64 percent) didn’t even know that the ACA insurance marketplace reforms start Tuesday, and just over half (51 percent) of Americans said that they don’t have enough information about the law to understand how it will affect them.
