Let’s Try Telling the Truth About Republican Health Care Policy Preferences For a Change
By 
Jeff Sessions’s farcical effort to take away protection for people with pre-existing conditions is something that should be highlighted for the midterms. And smart Democrats are talking about nothing but PUTIN doing this:
Whatever your political party or your views on the size of government or social issues or foreign policy or Roseanne or the NFL, if you are one of 52 million Americans with a pre-existing health condition, I encourage you to vote for Democrats this year to save your healthcare .
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) June 9, 2018
In one day, House GOP voted to cut $7 billion from children's health insurance, & DOJ announced plans to dismantle protections for people with preexisting conditions.
We need to stop this attack on affordable health care. We'll have that opportunity on November 6th. #PA17
— Conor Lamb (@ConorLambPA) June 8, 2018
I dunno, call be crazy, but it strikes me that telling the truth about what are and have always been the health care policy preferences of national Republicans will be much more politically effective than “but you’ve always shared the goal of universal healthcare reform so you have to support the ACA GOTCHA CHECKMATE WINGNUTS!” And at a minimum the former has the virtue of actually being true.
To pick up on the discussion in yesterday’s thread, some well-meaning lefties severely underestimate the political difficulty of getting to European-style universal healthcare because they assume that nobody is actually worried about losing their current employer-provided insurance. (Politics is easy when you assume everyone agrees with you ex ante!) But whatever people should think, in practice people tend to like the insurance they currently have and are also very risk-averse, which is one reason LBJ Didn’t. Even. Try to create a public system for most people. (You really need to read this if you’re interested.) This is a crucial reason why the ACA was initially unpopular even though most of its components polled very well. But Republican repeal efforts have made the ACA much more popular — risk aversion is now working in favor of the ACA. Democrats are almost certainly smart to keep hammering the point, and should definitely stop the bullshit about Republicans sharing Democratic goals, which just helps the Republican Heritage Uncertainty Principle shell game.