BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
The soup is not quite simmering, yet some conservatives are too anxious to serve it to the American people.
The soup is Obamacare, and for some activists, House Republicans are not being aggressive enough to serve its repeal.
Patience, my friends, patience. Obamacare will be repealed, slowly, but surely.
Congressional Republicans have voted about a million times to repeal the clunky law, to little effect. But those repeal votes have been premature.
Thus far, the only thing that the voters really know about Obamacare is that it is somehow associated with Barack Obama.
How you look at the law is defined largely by how you look at the President. If you like him, you like the law. If you hate him, you hate the law. And if you are ambivalent about him, you most likely don’t care about the law.
But that is about to change.
So far, only the most positive aspects of Obamacare have been implemented.
Young adults get to stay on their parent’s health insurance. Young women get all the free birth control pills they want. Pre-existing conditions won’t disqualify you from getting insurance.
So far, so good. But then it gets complicated.
Pretty soon, once the state exchanges are set up, a lot of companies are going to start dumping their employees from their insurance policies. They would rather pay the fines.
Young people are going to find it harder to get jobs, because small businesses are going to want to continue to be classified as too small to be under Obamacare.
More and more workers are going to become part-time. It is going to be harder for these folks to get 30 hours of work, because the 30 hour threshold brings in all kinds of requirements under Obamacare.
Senior citizens, especially those living in rural areas, are going to be dumped from their Medicare Advantage programs, because Obamacare guts funding for Medicare Advantage.
Folks who are over 26 who have chosen not to be insured are going to have to start paying fines because that is what the government mandates.
There are going to be fewer doctors, because they won’t like working for the lower wages imposed by Obamacare. That will make it harder for normal Americans to get health care.
All kinds of medical devices will start costing more because of the new tax imposed by Obamacare.
When all of this starts happening in the next year or so, the people who hate Obama will continue to hate Obama and they will demand that Obamacare be repealed. But they have been consistent in their hatred, and it won’t matter much.
The problem for the President is that the people who are ambivalent about Obama will start turning on him, just as the 2014 elections get rolling. They won’t like Obamacare and they will become more vocal.
Even the people who love Obama will start questioning that devotion, especially younger voters. They will be especially upset by the fines imposed by Obamacare, the fines they can’t afford to pay.
That is when the soup will start boiling. And once the soup boils, that is when the Republicans can take it off the stove and serve it to the American people. That is when Obamacare will be repealed.
Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.