By DAVID NATHER
Democrats have a general idea of what it would take to put the Obamacare rollout back on track. Fix the damn website, they say, and most of the other problems will take care of themselves.
But will they? The problem is that neither the administration or the House and Senate yoked to it can describe a threshold for when the public will view the health law as on the way to recovery.Continue Reading
What does the moment of success look like? Democrats aren’t quite sure - which makes party faithful up for re-election in 2014 increasingly nervous and makes the White House’s ability to set realistic expectations exceedingly difficult.
After a month of devastating stories and late-night jokes about the launch of the health care law, the administration needs to convince the public that Obamacare is more than a series of canceled policies and computer hiccups. It’s just not clear how the Obama team can convincingly do that, especially now that the early enrollment in the federal website could be as low as 40,000 to 50,000 people, according to the Wall Street Journal — way below the administration’s goal.
And it’s not just President Barack Obama’s reputation that’s on the line — it’s every Democrat who’s up for re-election in a year, especially the red-state Senate Democrats who are facing the closest races.
Democrats are still hoping to get back to the law’s broader vision: a health care safety net that closes huge gaps and helps all Americans, especially those who have been shut out of the market because of pre-existing conditions.
But how can they recover when the stumble-filled website, and now the canceled health insurance policies around the country, have already given the Obamacare rollout such a lousy first impression? And when every new development - such as the low enrollment numbers, which the administration is supposed to release officially this week - is viewed within the prism of the president’s signature domestic achievement turning into a national joke?
Most Democrats insist that the main path to recovery is as easy as fixing the website. That’s the line even from the Senate Democrats who bent Obama’s ear at the White House last week about the rollout. They just can’t give any concrete suggestions on what else it would take — which is why most of them sound like the old Saturday Night Live “fix it” guy: “Identify a problem, FIX IT. Identify another problem, FIX IT!”
“Getting the website working again would be a major step in the right direction,” said Mark Pryor of Arkansas, whose re-election race is expected to be one of the closest contests next year.
“These technical problems can be fixed, and they’re working very hard every day to fix them,” offered Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, another top GOP target.
Health care experts agree that patching up the federal website by the end of the month, as the administration has promised, is the key to solving a lot of problems — especially by allowing Obamacare enrollment to soar beyond the early, pitiful numbers that are trickling out now. But even if the website was working tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve all of the Democrats’ headaches.
The other big priority, as Obama promised in his NBC interview last week, is to take care of the millions of people whose individual health insurance policies are being canceled because they don’t meet Obamacare standards. And there’s no easy way for the administration to do that without unraveling the law in other ways.
Obama declared in the NBC interview that “we’re going to have to work hard— to make sure that those folks— are, you know, taken care of.” Landrieu has said she has the perfect solution: She’s introduced a bill that would allow people to keep their individual health plans, and just tell them how many extra benefits are in Obamacare plans so they can decide whether to switch. House Republicans have scheduled a vote on their own version on Friday.
But that’s not what all Democrats want — the White House has been silent on it, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been noncommittal on whether Landrieu will ever get a vote. The reason, health care experts say, is that the bill could actually hurt more people than it helps. Insurers have based their pricing on the ability to get all of those people into Obamacare plans — so if they don’t switch, the prices could go haywire for everyone else in those plans.
Just try explaining that in a non-tone-deaf way, though, if you’re on the White House communications team — or a Democrat in a close re-election race.
“If you allow the healthy enrollees to stay out in their old policy, the insurers lose money and the program falls apart. There is no free lunch here,” said Jonathan Gruber, an MIT health economist who consulted on both Obamacare and the Massachusetts health care reform law.
Somehow, though, a complete Obamacare recovery would have to include some measure to make those people whole — even if the administration is still searching for a way to get there.
The administration must convince the public that the law is more than a series of hiccups.
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