Barney Frank Says Obama's Health-Care Push Was a 'Mistake'

(via New York)

In the interview Barney Frank says this:

You think Obama overinterpreted his mandate with health care?
The problem with health care is this: Health care is enormously important to people. When you tell them that you’re going to extend health care to people who don’t now have it, they don’t see how you can do that without hurting them. So I think he underestimated, as did Clinton, the sensitivity of people to what they see as an effort to make them share the health care with poor people.

I think we paid a terrible price for health care. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after Scott Brown won, I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform but certainly not health care.

And if you’d done it with that sequencing, you could have still gotten health care before 2012?
I’m not sure, but I think you could have gotten some pieces of it. And yeah, if we’d held the House, we could have gotten it.

So you think health care, in part, was the reason you lost the House.
The depths of the recession, that the president didn’t want to blame Republicans because he wanted to work together, and health care—those were the factors.

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It’s okay to reflect back and say the things he does, and I wouldn’t have expected anything different, but, I think he’s wrong to say that the ACA should not have been pushed. Here’s what Candidate Obama said:

“In order to fix our economic crisis and rebuild our middle class, we need to fix our healthcare system too. It is clear that the time has come right now to solve this problem.”
—Barack Obama, October 4th, 2008

Passing the Healthcare act was a major promise kept. And not only that, it was moral obligation. The problem, as I see it, was the publicity surrounding the details of the act. Dissenting voices and scare tactics overtook the airwaves and the print media. Fox News machine, aided and abetted by Koch Brothers, went on a major offensive and were highly successful. People were bombarded on all sides with false claims that a) Medicare would be phased out b) Care would be rationed c) Death panels would take over d) People would need to wait years to get the care they get now instantly. All wrong. Negative publicity drowned out all the real, positive, helpful and needed provisions in the law.

Waiting to do this would not have worked. The same voices would have been even louder. What would have helped, and still will, was if Democrats, both in House and Senate, would have gone on the offensive, speaking loudly and vocally in support of the act. Explaining to their constituents the effects of the act. Reading up and understanding the law and answering questions from constituents. That would have been the right thing to do. Instead, Democrats ran scared. They did not have the President’s back, and they did their constituents a disservice by taking the lazy way out and not educating themselves on the law. And Barney Frank is wrong in saying what he did.