Why is Obamacare such a cause for concern among conservatives?
It is hard to guess. What they claim is their reason for opposing it need not have a lot to do with why they actually want it destroyed. I have a few guesses.
(*) Obamacare is a huge Democrat achievement, and if it works as it was planned (and remember, its success was estimated probabilistically, and a lot depends on behavior trends, as most insurance initiatives do; a lot of people acting irrationally can derail it), it will be a huge issue on the credit side for the Dems, and you can see Democrats, both great and small (mostly small, unfortunately) running on the strength of it for a decade. "We brought you Obamacare! Vote for me!"
Obamacare is also a Republican loss. They fought like dogs to sabotage it, and if they fail, it will be an enormous dent in their reputation. They brought up everything from Freedom of Choice, motherhood and apple pie, and had to go to the extreme of painting the Insurance Industry as the saviours of the nation, to vilify the Bill (but of course they went right back and said, no, the Insurance Industry is the very devil incarnate, and the Bill was written by them, and is a piece of crap, etc, etc). So in the puerile world of political point-scoring, Obamacare could be a huge smudge on the GOP scoresheet.
(*) The GOP has been heavily lobbied by the Insurance Industry. This is senseless, really, because the Industry does not really lose such a lot. There are controls of runaway profit-taking, I suppose, but it seems to me that the new law strengthens the industry, while reining in its lucrativity. If the Insurance Industry fights the law, they are really making things harder for themselves. After a year or two of Obamacare, I believe that the population will look at the Insurance Industry with a very jaundiced eye, but nevertheless I believe it will be in a comfortable position, if not going like gangbusters.
(*) A few small businesses, and small-business organizations, have been persuaded early that the new law is to their disadvantage. As far as I understand, while all businesses are given new responsibilities for the health care of their employees, they have also been given new financial help for that purpose. In all fairness, I have to say that this is inappropriate; I am strongly of the opinion that Health Care is the responsibility of the State (the government, at any rate), but Congress —as it was constituted in 2004-2005— distrusted the Government bureaucracy, and decided that small businesses were more to be trusted with providing health care for the population. This attitude has been nurtured by Business itself, and Business has only itself to blame for promulgating the myth that Business is more to be trusted than Government. Yeah, right. At any rate, now that various sectors of the Small Business whatchamacallit have taken the view that Obamacare is bad for Small Businesses, those who lied to Small Business in the first place have begun to believe it themselves. Isn't that amazing?
(*) Healthy young people have been incited to protest against the law, because it requires everyone to carry health insurance. Some of the young people in my extended family were railing about the new law, and moaning that they could not afford to carry insurance (especially since some of them were unemployed), and, as you can imagine, young people are, generally speaking, not subject to the health problems of older people. Furthermore, young people are perfectly happy to ignore whatever health problems they have. And again, young people looking for employment are eager to present themselves as being in almost amazingly good health, even if they suspect that they might have a chronic condition, which of course must be kept from their prospective employers at all cost.
(*) The people leading the Republican Party at the moment are some of the dimmest bulbs we have had in government for a century. Let's face it: Health Care is a complex issue, and of all solutions to the problem of National Health Care, the one that was in fact adopted (by a Coalition of idealistic liberals, scaredy-cat Democrats who were nervous about the fallout from the bill —with good reason, in hindsight— cooperative Republicans, who were afraid of the backlash from their more conservative fellow-party members —with good reason— and meddling members of the Insurance Industry Lobby, who were anxious to make sure the law would not debilitate the Industry) is a compromise, and so even harder to figure out than such a law would have been if it was simple in design. So, not too many people are able to read the law in its entirely and make sense of it. We liberals —and forgive me for including you in this category— for the most part endorse the law because we have some faith in Obama and his team. I have not read the law, and I'm afraid to start reading it now. But such people as Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Rick Santorum (who isn't anything connected with any government body, at the moment) and the members of the conservative media have no hope of understanding it. They do not have the mental equipment for it, and possibly not the vocabulary. All they can do is to spot an isolated sentence here and there, and cling to them with furious indignation, misinterpret its intention and its consequences, and run to proclaim their hostility to it, and to the Act as a whole.
A big mistake that congressmen make, in poking holes in the law, is that they have of course forgotten what it was like before they had the fabulous health plan they enjoy as member of congress. They object to the law because it makes it possible that a person may have to change their doctor. Well, if your health plan is like my health plan, I have been forced to change my doctor any number of times, because my employer changes insurance providers every once in a while, and sometimes a health plan has a list of Preferred Providers, which means a new doctor. We went to the extent of hanging on to our non-preferred doctor, just for the sake of continuity, despite the very real antipathy between our doctor and our insurance. So far, so good.
A few Republicans, notably John McCain, have said that de-funding Obamacare is not a possibility. Who knows; perhaps McCain has been in sympathy with a unified health care system for the USA all along, and simply did not bring it up for fear of being accused of being UnAmerican. It seems to me that anyone who has served in the Armed Forces can only be in favor of Health Care Reform, both because of the health care they get as members of the Armed Forces, and the miserable health care they get once they're discharged. Both Kerry and McCain and any real veterans (unlike George W. Bush) are likely to have their heads screwed on well enough to know a good thing when they see it. There is no going back from Obamacare, unless we want bigger chaos than we have now.
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