Politico‘s Jason Millman writes:
How much does Rick Santorum hate President Barack Obama’s health care law? So much that he even opposes the parts a lot of Republicans like.
The Republican presidential candidate, talking health care across the street from Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic Monday morning, blasted parts of the Affordable Care Act that poll well even among Republican voters — like guaranteeing coverage for people with pre-existing conditions and making health insurers cover preventive care.
Santorum, who has touted free market health principles like health savings accounts as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, defended insurance industry practices the law eliminates, like setting premiums based on people’s health status.
Sigh. I refer my right honorable friend to the smack-down I gave such silliness some time ago:
Asking people whether they support the law’s pre-existing conditions provisions is like asking whether they want sick people to pay less for medical care. Of course they will say yes. If anything, it’s amazing that as many as 36 percent of the public are so economically literate as to know that these government price controls will actually harm people with pre-existing conditions. Also amazing is that among people with pre-existing conditions, equal numbers believe these provisions will be useless or harmful as think they will help.
But as the collapse of the CLASS Act and private markets for child-only health insurance have shown, and as the Obama administration has argued in federal court, the pre-existing conditions provisions cannot exist without the wildly unpopular individual mandate because on their own, the pre-existing conditions provisions would cause the entire health insurance market to implode.
If the pre-existing conditions provisions are a (supposed) benefit of the law, then the individual mandate is the cost of those provisions. If voters don’t like the individual mandate–if they aren’t willing to pay the cost of the law’s purported benefits–then the “popular” provisions aren’t popular, either.
Or, as Firedoglake’s Jon Walker puts it, ObamaCare is about as popular as pepperoni and broken glass pizza.
Even among Republican voters? Good grief.
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