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【Daily Reading】Health-care law has changed game ...

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发表于 2013-11-18 14:11:41 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

UPPER DUBLIN, Pa. — Few places may better explain how the bungled launch of President Obama’s health-care law has scrambled the political landscape for Democrats than this hamlet north of Philadelphia.

Democrats have been hoping to capitalize on the political fallout for the GOP from the recent government shutdown. If they can do so anywhere, it should be in the suburbs north and west of the city where three adjoining congressional districts represent a confluence of Democratic Party ambitions for the 2014 midterm elections.

The 13th District is represented by Allyson Y. Schwartz, a popular five-term Democrat who is the leading candidate for governor against a Republican incumbent widely regarded as the most vulnerable in the country.

The two other districts are held by moderate Republicans: Rep. Patrick Meehan in the 7th and Rep. Michael G. Fitzpatrick in the 8th. Obama won both in 2008 and lost both by less than one percentage point in 2012. If Democrats are going to get anywhere near the 18 seats they need to take control of the House in 2014, these two are must-wins, and a few weeks ago, with the GOP suffering in public opinion polls, everything seemed possible for Democrats.

The Affordable Care Act may have changed that.

The recent debacle over HealthCare.gov’s rollout may have narrowed whatever perceived advantages Democratic candidates may have had over Republican opponents. In some minds, the health-care law’s flubs have merged with the government shutdown to render an unfavorable verdict on all of Washington.

“No one party’s to blame. All of them are to blame. They’re not working together,” said Rynda Klein, 70, a pharmacist who remembers early stumbles when Medicare was introduced in the late 1960s.

Said Amy Booth of Upper Dublin: “I don’t understand why we have a House of Representatives anymore. It doesn’t do anything. They just send bills to the Senate and watch them die.”

Booth, 52, is a Democrat, and she called the health insurance rollout “a big disappointment.”

“From an administration that was so high-tech during their campaign with data mining and such, it’s surprising that a Web site they build is a complete mess,” she said.

Booth said she will probably vote for Schwartz next year instead of Gov. Tom Corbett (R), the unpopular state executive who could become the first Pennsylvania governor in almost 50 years to lose reelection.

Schwartz knows that her votes on the health-care legislation will be part of her campaign. On Friday, she voted with her party against a GOP effort to delay a portion of the new law, while -Meehan and Fitzpatrick voted yes, with their party.

“There should have been a nonpartisan reaction to the fact that this rollout of the Web site did not go well,” she said in an interview. “Instead it became a partisan argument, and it shouldn’t have.” That is not likely to change as Election Day 2014 gets closer.

The Republican measure that passed easily on Friday would allow insurers to continue offering plans that don’t meet the standard requirements of the new law. It was an effort to fix a part of the legislation for which the president had to apologize, after it was clear that some people were receiving cancellation notices from insurers, even though he had promised that Americans who liked their health plans could keep them under the new law.

From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/health-care-law-has-changed-game-for-democrats-looking-to-2014-election/2013/11/16/71d8e5fa-4e65-11e3-be6b-d3d28122e6d4_story.html?hpid=z1

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