Back in 2009 and 2010, former Alabama Democratic Rep. Artur Davis was the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to vote against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which would later become known as ObamaCare.
Davis suffered politically and endured searing criticisms from his fellow Democrats at the time. Jesse Jackson went as far as to say that he could not see how Davis could vote against the law and still call himself a black man.
Yellowhammer News contacted Davis this week, almost three years after he voted against the president’s signature piece of legislation, to see if he felt vindicated in his opposition to ObamaCare now that its rollout has been such a disaster.
According to Davis, who has since become a Republican and now resides in northern Virginia, some Democrats predicted serious problems with the president’s healthcare law. However, their concerns were ignored by House Democratic leadership.
“Look, most of the failings in the Affordable Care Act were easily foreseeable in 2009 and in 2010 when the legislation was passed — every single one of them,” Davis said. “I remember being on the Ways & Means Committee when a lot of the bill was drafted. I remember there being a lot of policy discussions with Democratic members of Congress and Democratic staffers about what this legislation would look like and how it would play out in the real world. Virtually everything that has gone wrong with this act was not only foreseeable, it was something that was talked about and something that was anticipated. But for a variety of reasons — political and otherwise — Democratic leadership chose to go ahead with the bill anyway.”
When congressional Democrats asked their leadership what would happen to people who had existing health insurance plans, Davis said they were fed the now infamous line, “If they like their plan, they can keep their plan.”
“In 2009 when the bill was being drafted, a number of Democratic members raised the basic question, ‘what’s going to happen to people who have existing insurance plans?’ The response from advocates of the bill was, ‘Well those people will be able to keep their coverage,’ but that never quite made sense,” Davis said. “One of the elements of the bill specifically said every private insurance plan would be measured by this new government test to determine whether it was adequate or sufficient. All of a sudden this would become one of the few consumer products on the market where the federal government was deciding your choice as a consumer as to whether something was right or not for you and your family.”
“If you’re going to put a provision in a plan that says that some insurance plans will be deemed not qualified, well, what’s going to happen to a plan that’s deemed not qualified?” he continued. “An insurer is going to drop coverage. They’re not going to automatically reenroll you in some magic new plan. They’re going to drop coverage and make you have to select a qualified plan. That was foreseeable in 2009 and 2010. The notion that some companies would drop coverage because it would make more economic sense for them to do that than to sustain coverage — that was easily foreseeable in 2009 and 2010. The notion that the Cadillac tax in the plan might push companies to downsize the scope of the plan they provided or to charge higher premiums to their employees — that was something that was easily foreseeable and something that was discussed in 2009 and 2010.”
Davis also said the concerns were raised inside the Democratic caucus as the whether the Healthcare.gov website would be able to handle all of the new enrollees converging on the site on the day enrollment opened.
“Questions were even raised about what would happen when all of these people become eligible for the exchanges on a certain date and all try to enroll. Could we guarantee that it would happen in a seamless fashion? That question was raised in 2009 and 2010 and I vividly recall there being a lot of uncertainty among Democratic members. ‘What happens if people don’t figure this out? What happens if people don’t get on the exchanges? What happens if they don’t participate?’
“So I don’t actually view any of these developments as some unexpected consequences that have fallen out of the sky,” Davis said in conclusion. “Virtually every one of them was anticipated and discussed and ultimately ignored.”
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