President Obama’s controversial, legacy-defining health care reform law has hit a new low for approval – and a new high for disapproval – just as the second open enrollment period gets underway. Just 37 percent of people approve of the law, while 56 percent disapprove.
Obamacare approval has remained deeply underwater ever since the Democrats first rammed it through Congress without a single Republican vote, but Gallup, which conducted the poll between November 6th and 9th, called the most recent numbers a “new numerical low.”
The record dislike comes as the Obama Administration lowered its enrollment expectations for 2015 by several million people, and just as the law’s credibility crumbles in the court of public opinion – and potentially in the Supreme Court of the United States – thanks almost entirely to a single architect of the law named Jonathan Gruber.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court announced they will hear the King v. Burwell case to decide whether subsidies offered through the federal exchange are not legal. Gruber, an MIT economist who helped construct the law, repeatedly stated (as does the text of the bill) that subsidies were only to be provided to citizens in states that set up their own exchanges.
If the court rules against the Administration, people in over thirty states – those operating on the federal exchange – would be deemed ineligible to receive subsidies, as the law originally intended. Such a ruling would also free more than 57 million people from Obamacare’s incredibly unpopular mandates.
In doing so, King v. Burwell would essentially destroy the cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act.
Moreover, Jonathan Gruber continues to contribute to the erosion of America’s opinion of Obamacare via a series of videos that have been released, in which he essentially states that Obamacare was passed entirely on deceit and by taking advantage of the naivety of the American public.
The law’s costs, taxes, mandates, and other nuances were carefully shielded so as to hide their true impact on the American people, get through Congress, and slide by the Supreme Court.
The irony is striking, given that not only did President Obama criticize the Clinton Administration for failing to pass health care reform because “they went behind closed doors,” but he also referred to his own team as “the most transparent administration in history.”
However, during the Obamacare debate, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) explained to the American public that “we have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it.” What was in it was a barrage of broken promises that cannot be papered over any longer. And voters – the same “stupid” ones Gruber had to fool to sell Obamacare (and the same ones who twice elected Barack Obama to the White House) – have had enough.
Since the passage of Obamacare, Democrats have lost control of both chambers of Congress. After fawning over Gruber’s work, Obama and his allies continue to try to distance themselves from Gruber, but it is too little, too late.
The ugly head of liberalism has exposed itself. It is a philosophy based on the idea that the American people are too incapable of making decisions for them, and so they must be directed by a powerful federal government handing down deceitful edicts through bureaucracies like HHS and the IRS.
But that is not the American spirit, and it is being repudiated for free-market principles and the values of choice, competition, and innovation.
Obamacare is certainly crumbling under its own weight, but the new Congress must still act on their mandate to dismantle this disaster. President Obama will never put aside partisan politics to free the American people from his legacy-defining law, but there are still actions a bipartisan veto-proof majority in Congress can take to lessen its harmful effects.
The latest Gallup poll and Gruber-gate confirm that the direction of bigger government is a failed agenda. Its politics are terrible and its policies worse. Come 2015, it will be time for a new direction in America.