From a purely mercenary view into politics, the right “play” is to let Obamacare crash and burn while keeping their hands clean, standing by and saying “I told you so”.
Problem is, real people are getting really hurt by this, and mostly as innocent bystanders. The self-employed, who are being hit hardest, are probably more likely to vote Republican than the average population, so it’s not a matter of punishing people who brought this upon themselves.
So, how does one balance the two? How can you, as a minority party, help provide relief to those who are being harmed by this policy without indirectly propping up that bad policy? And if you don’t do anything at all, do you take a hit for letting people founder?
It’s not an easy set of decisions to make. There’s going to have to be some tradeoff of practical vs. political, and there will be critics deriding any choice.
“From a purely mercenary view into politics, the right “play” is to let Obamacare crash and burn while keeping their hands clean, standing by and saying ‘I told you so’.”
There are a few reasons why we cannot just stand by in this case. Of course the first one is that real people are getting hurt by this, not to mention that our children will be hurt by this their entire lives if we don’t clean up Obama’s mess.
Another problem here is that there simply is no “crash and burn” endgame that will benefit anyone. We will never see Obama, Pelosi and Reid admit that their socialist utopia has failed. They’ll blame the Republicans, blame the insurance companies, and issue one executive order after another. All the while Medicaid’s rolls will keep growing until it becomes a de facto single-payer system. The longer we let this continue, the more people there will be dependent on Medicaid and other subsidies who will be easily persuadable to vote to keep their benefits coming no matter what.
Republicans must not be drawn into making little tweaks to the Affordable Health Care Act, but we must immediately start offering solutions to this disaster and forcing every single Democrat incumbent to vote against these solutions over and over again. By solutions I don’t mean an alternative Big-Government plan, I mean the abolishment of all the mandates, all the regulations and requirements, and all the taxes.