Barney Frank: Passing Obamacare Was a Mistake
Retiring Rep Barney Frank is now saying that when congress passed Obamacare, it was a mistake. Obama believed his own hype, basking in the glory that the mainstream media gave him, even though he knew there would be much opposition. Frank then said this same thing happened to President Bill Clinton, which was a mistake.
“Although Obama succeeded where Clinton had failed, his success begat precisely the same political outcome as Clinton’s failure: Democrats got creamed at the ballot box the following November. Averred Frank, “I think we paid a terrible price for health care.”
You would think that Obama would have learned from the past, as back in 1994, following Clinton’s attempt at a blatant government takeover of the healthcare sector, Republicans took both houses of Congress and won a large number of state and local elections as well. In 2010, after the passage of ObamaCare, Republicans took 66 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them control of that chamber once again.
What he failed to realize, what people opposed back then, we still oppose today.
Frank says he saw this coming. “I would not have pushed [healthcare reform] as hard,” he told New York. “As a matter of fact, after Scott Brown won, I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform” — which he also got in the form of the monstrous Dodd-Frank financial act — “but certainly not health care.”
Frank though didn’t think it was a big enough mistake to vote against. Republicans were quick to pounce on Frank’s comments. The National Republican Congressional Committee issued a press release stating, “Even Barney Frank admits that ObamaCare has been a disaster.”
Then Frank fired back by saying that Republicans were twisting his words. What he meant was that it was a mistake to do it first. Nowhere did he state that ObamaCare was a bad idea. He merely argued that it cost his party politically.
When asked why Obamacare hurt the Democrats, Frank said it is because the upper and middle classes are greedy and don’t want to help the poor. So now it’s the middle and upper classes’ fault. You can’t force an idea off on people, who know the plan can’t self support itself.
Frank added, that Obama underestimated, as did Clinton, the sensitivity of people to what they see as an effort to make them share the health care with poor people. And here is where Frank is off target. The fact is, most opponents have objected to being forced to purchase health insurance; the case currently before the Supreme Court, for example, challenges the law’s constitutionality on the basis of the individual mandate.
Others are concerned about the myriad rules and regulations contained in the law and issued on the basis of it, many of which are highly intrusive and some of which infringe on their religious freedom. But Frank does believe had Democrats taken just parts of the bill, it may have passed easily through congress. This is, in fact, how much of the welfare state has been built: incrementally, not with big, headline-making programs.
The longer the welfare state is permitted to metastasize, however, the more difficult incremental reductions become and the more likely the whole edifice will have to be cashiered because Uncle Sam is simply broke.
Tags: Dodd-Frank financial act, National Republican Congressional Committee, passing Obamacare was a mistake, President Bill Clinton, retiring Rep Barney Frank, US Supreme Court and mandate
This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 at 8:01 am and is filed under Finance and Business, General, Health Care, In the News, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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