Opinion: Obamacare Still A Winning Campaign Issue

Every Democrat who’ll be on the ballot in November -- from former Vice President Joe Biden to candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives -- has received an invaluable campaign contribution from the unlikeliest of sources: the White House.

For reasons that are inexplicable to anyone who is thinking even a little bit clearly, President Donald Trump has once again renewed his call for the Supreme Court to invalidate the whole of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the landmark 2010 health-care legislation commonly known as “Obamacare.”

That he's doing this on the eve of the 2020 election makes no sense, of course. But what is even less explicable is this: He's calling for an end to Obamacare during a raging pandemic that has caused the unemployment rate to spike, leaving many people who rely on their employer-sponsored health insurance to fear, rightly, that a single misfortune could put them and their family in great peril.

One imagines Democratic candidates and their campaigns across the land being awestruck by the president's latest move. Perhaps some, in a lighthearted moment, may have wondered, at least to themselves, if they'd be required to report Trump's anti-Obamacare move as an in-kind contribution to their campaigns.

Further, one can easily imagine not a few Republican incumbents, as well as some of those seeking to unseat a Democrat currently in office, smacking their foreheads in astonished disbelief over Trump's latest.

Fully 10 years after Obamacare became law, Republicans are still routinely yapping about the need to “repeal and replace” the legislation that they so love to hate. But though there’s been a decade of their saying the same thing, over and over again, no one has managed to come up with any kind of a realistic alternative vision.

Democrats, on the other hand, continue to argue that what's needed is not only to protect Obamacare, but also to expand it. This is exactly what Biden has been saying, with his push for adding a so-called public option that would allow more individuals and families to benefit from the legislation.

The political advertisements write themselves:

“In this most-difficult of times, when even leaving your home to head to the grocery store can present real danger, Democrats are working to protect your health care. Republicans? Led by President Donald Trump, they’re trying to kill it.”

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