Echoing one of his Democratic colleague, Sen. Tom Harkin, one of the coauthors of the Affordable Care Act, now says that Democrats made a mistake pushing Obamacare through.
“We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it. So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all,” Harkin told The Hill.
“What we did is we muddle through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively.”
A recent report from the nonpartisan General Accountability Office has found that the three largest insurance companies held about 86 percent of all customers in the individual health insurance market in 2013, up from 83 percent when Obamacare was passed in 2010. Obamacare has imposed such regulatory burdens that smaller companies have effectively been pushed out of the exchanges all together, increasing prices for consumers and decreasing the number of options.
Despite this, Harkin says he does still stand behind some of the things in Obamacare like preventing insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions and its emphasis on health-conscious choices for Americans.
“All that’s good. All the prevention stuff is good but it’s just really complicated. It doesn’t have to be that complicated,” he told The Hill. He said the final version is too weak and said his fellow Democrats bowed to political pressure.
“We had the votes to do that and we blew it,” he said.
Harkin’s comments sound similar to a speech delivered by Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the third-ranking Democratic leader, last week. Schumer criticized the Democrats for “wasting” their political capital on the approved version of Obamacare.
He argued that Democrats should have worked on middle class-targeted economic programs.
“Unfortunately Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them,” he said. “We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem — healthcare reform.”
