Krauthammer: Schumer Criticizing O’Care Because It’s Bad Democrats, Not America

Krauthammer: Schumer Criticizing Obamacare Not Because It's Bad For the Country, But Because It's Bad For Democrats (RealClearPolitics)

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The essence of Schumer's cynicism is precisely that he's identifying what was wrong with Obamacare and then saying it was a terrible thing not because it's bad for the country but because it's going to work against Democratic partisan interests. He said, for example, why did we spend all this effort on the uninsured, a third of them aren't even registered. There's only 5% of the population who are helped by Obamacare. So on balance there are more people hurt, they will then oppose us politically. 

This is all about whether it's going to help the Democrats. He is repeating precisely the argument conservatives and Republicans have made at the time of Obamacare. We argued it was against the interest of the country to jeopardize the health insurance of the over 80% of Americans who liked it, and for whom it was working, had this huge transfer of wealth. But most importantly, why did they have to essentially nationalize healthcare, have all these mandates -- decisions on what has to be in your plan, what isn't in your plan, you lose your plan if you don't have it, the whole change of procedures? 

The change of American medicine in order to help a very small population who could have helped in a very different way if you had been honest about it and said it's going to cost to get more uninsured, expand the Medicaid, do it 100 other ways and say what Gruber has admitted, is that they knew in advance that it would damage a lot of folks, help a small number. In other words, the argument we made of why it was going to hurt the country and disrupt medicine and decrease the choices people have is now accepted by a Chuck Schumer because he sees it's hurting his party. That is a definition of cynicism.