The Right's Latest Scheme to Sabotage Obamacare

[babylonsister]

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114028/obamacare-sabotage-watch-conservative-campaign-gets-real

The Right's Latest Scheme to Sabotage Obamacare

BY JONATHAN COHN


It was one thing when Obamcare critics started fighting attempts to educate people about the law's insurance options—warning sports leagues not to promote the new benefits, for example, or criticizing states undertaking outreach efforts of their own. Now some conservatives are taking it a step farther. They're launching campaigns designed to discourage young people from using the law to get insurance. Via David Morgan of Reuters:

FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative issue group financed by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, known for funding conservative causes, are planning separate media and grassroots campaigns aimed at adults in their 20s and 30s - the very people Obama needs to have sign up for healthcare coverage in new online insurance exchanges if his reforms are to succeed.

"We're trying to make it socially acceptable to skip the exchange," said Dean Clancy, vice president for public policy at FreedomWorks, which boasts 6 million supporters. The group is designing a symbolic "Obamacare card" that college students can burn during campus protests.

Brian Beutler is aghast. So is Kevin Drum: "What's next? A campaign to get people to skip wearing seat belts? To skip using baby seats in cars?" Drum also wants to know whether FreedomWorks "plans to help out the first person who takes them up on this and then contracts leukemia." A good quesiton, that.

snip//

We can debate honestly, and constructively, whether Obamacare gets the prices and penalties for this responsiblity right—and, if not, whether those should be adjusted. But the basic idea that Republican leaders are protesting so intensely is one that you would expect the defenders of "personal responsiblity" to support—and one, until recently, many of them did support. It's enough to make you wonder how much of this opposition is about Obamacare, and how much is about the guy who signed it into law.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at the New Republic. Follow him on twitter @CitizenCohn