WI: No Obamacare

What if Obama decided not to touch healthcare? Maybe the POD is Hillary telling him how Hillarycare lead to the rise of Gingrich. What would Obama's Presidency be like? What happens in the house and senate in 2010-2014? What does the Tea Party do if it exists?
 
Probably more of a honeymoon period and less backlash. Not to say there would not be backlash. It was there in irrational white hot hate from day one, and that included the tea party. But it could stave off the Republican resurgence. Health care also showed the signs of disunity in the Democratic party. The party is made up of liberals, moderates and even conservatives in Congress, and they don't all agree all the time, and certainly did not on healthcare. However, I think Obama would feel underaccomplished. Healthcare reform was an idea whose time had come. In terms of healthcare, it would be what it was before the ACA, and premiums were rising and rising at a fast rate than they have under Obamacare ever.

My suggestion would be to move this to Chat.
 
It is not very likely that Obama would have left healthcare totally untouched--his base wanted him to do *something* on healthcare. What he *might* have done was the less ambitious program Rahm Emanuel urged on him:

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After Obama had made his decision, Rahm threw himself into getting the President's plan passed and worked almost nonstop on it, the book reports. It also goes into more detail than previously known about the dramatically scaled down health reform plan Rahm urged Obama to pursue instead -- something advisers derisively called "the Titanic plan" because it insured women and children first.

According to the book, when the health care wars were heating up in August of 2009, and centrist Dems were dragging their feet, Rahm mounted an aggressive push to get Obama to shelve ambitious reform.

"For the better part of a week in August Rahm made the case aggressively," the book says.

Rahm urged the president instead to pursue a sharply reduced plan that would have insured more than 10 million Americans because it could get bipartisan support. Rahm's idea was to expand on previous Congressional plans to expand coverage for children, and boost the number of single mothers eligible for Medicaid -- hence "the Titanic plan."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/05/book_rahm_spent_week_aggressiv.html

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My guess is that even this less ambitious program would have gotten few Republican votes. But it might have enabled the Democrats to (barely) hold the House.
 
Obamacare didn't fix US healthcare, although it certainly provided insurance for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have it. At the same time, it did make life harder for certain groups of people at certain income levels, who ended up paying a chunk of their income into it (interestingly, MSN just had a story about this, claiming about 9 million Americans fall into that income level). So, without Obamacare, these people wouldn't have their incomes so badly affected... but there would be millions more who wouldn't have any kind of coverage. IIRC, the usual claim is that 20 million Americans have insurance through Obamacare. If the ACA hadn't been created, then a big topic of conversation in political circles would be the growing numbers of uninsured people. Hell, it was a big topic of conversation before Obamacare, as older members of ah.com could tell you. There might even be increasing calls for some kind of UHC, as more and more stories about 'this person died because he couldn't get health care' circulated...
 
American healthcare in 2009 was that car you were driving ten years after you should have bought a new one. It's rusty, falling apart, is sluggish, and you spend enough money repairing everything that goes wrong that it would have been better just to buy a new one.
 
It wouldn't have changed a lot about the Obama administration. Obamacare hurt more people than it helped, but the pain didn't come until 2014-16.

The big difference is we would be discussing the second Clinton administration in OTL and the Trump administration as alternate history. Hillary lost three solid blue states (PA, MI, WI) by narrow margins, and all three states were slammed with double-digit premium increases less than a month before the election. You can attribute the outcome to a lot of different factors when it's that close, but if the Affordable Care Act had lived up to its name, at least two of those states are likely to stay blue.
 
That is assuming Clinton gets the nomination. With no ACA, the democratic voters might throw support to a healthcare focused candidate.
 
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