The 2010 midterm elections were the initial referendum on lawmakers who voted for Obamacare: Democrats took a thumping. But two years later President Barack Obama proclaimed the debate over the law “settled” after he won a second term, treating his reelection as a judgment on his signature legislation. By the end of 2014, any legislator who supported the Affordable Care Act in Congress and sought reelection had faced the voters back home.
It’s small wonder that the national conversation has adopted a new set of topics in 2016: immigration, trade, Hillary Clinton’s email server, and Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Despite the GOP nominee’s obligatory vow to repeal and replace the health care statute, neither major-party candidate has spent much time discussing it on the stump.
But that doesn’t mean Obamacare isn’t still being debated as a campaign issue. In Indiana, Republican representative Todd Young is running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Dan Coats; he’s up against a ballot-box rarity—a lawmaker who voted for Obamacare who has yet to face the judgment of the voters: former senator Evan Bayh.
A moderate Democrat, Bayh had at first been skeptical of Obama’s health reform bill, but he became a pivotal convert on the legislation’s path to the president’s desk. Bayh provided one of the critical Senate votes Democrats needed to thwart the bill’s opponents in December 2009. Two months later, Bayh announced his intention to depart public office, saying that while “my passion for service to our fellow citizens is undiminished … my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned.” Time must have been restorative. Bayh was coaxed out of elective retirement earlier this year to replace a Democratic candidate who almost certainly would have lost.
Young is betting that Hoosiers haven’t forgotten how Obamacare was passed and will give Bayh a taste of what he missed six Novembers ago. “They’re seeking answers, and the answer is that Evan Bayh cast the deciding vote,” Young says, describing his opponent the way national Republicans have described every Democratic senator who could’ve kept Obamacare from amassing 60 supporters in the upper chamber.
Bayh was no typical backer of the law, however. He threatened to hold out through much of the legislative process in 2009 and only signed on when the measure’s tax on medical device sales was halved from 4.6 to 2.3 percent. He later expressed buyer’s remorse, writing in the Wall Street Journal that the tax proved to be a “law of unintended consequences,” stifling the very manufacturers that Democrats believed would flourish under Obamacare as newly insured Americans made use of more medical products. Bayh called on his former colleagues to repeal the tax. His bio credit-line in the Journal—”He is a partner at the McGuireWoods law firm, which represents several medical-device companies”—inspired mockery from the New Republic and New York magazine, which wondered sarcastically if there was any overlap in Bayh’s business interests and
policy interests.
Indiana is a major player in medical device manufacturing, with the industry employing more than 16,000 workers there. Determining the tax’s economic consequences is difficult—the tax only took effect in 2013 and is now subject to a temporary moratorium. But Young points to anecdotal evidence that companies have nixed expansion plans because of it. Cook Medical (based in Young’s hometown, Bloomington) put off building five new plants throughout the midwest. Southern Indiana hospital equipment maker Hill-Rom cited the tax as one of three factors prompting it to lay off 200 workers in 2012.
“The issue most on Hoosiers’ minds is job creation, job retention, and household income,” Young says. “To the extent I can continue communicating to Hoosiers that Obamacare is an anti-jobs law, a piece of legislation that has cut into the income of regular Hoosiers, then we are going to persuade people that this is of great significance and a disqualifying factor as they assess my candidacy and compare it to Evan Bayh’s.”
As a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Young has been working to roll back the law long before the current campaign. He introduced legislation to delay implementation of the statute’s individual mandate and moved to strike the requirement that workers putting in 30 hours a week be treated as full-time employees and receive mandatory insurance coverage. Young is among the Obamacare critics who contend that defining full-time work as 30 or more hours a week encourages employers to limit their workers’ hours to 29 or less.
Is the Obamacare issue getting any traction? To this point in the campaign, the press has covered Bayh’s residency issues more than the substance of his previous public service (which included two terms as governor and two terms as a senator). Bayh may be a prominent and popular name in Indiana politics. But after leaving the Senate, he has kept his life closer to Washington than Indiana. The evidence of that—home ownership in the nation’s capital and suspiciously low utility bills at his small Indianapolis condo—has cut into Bayh’s local appeal.
But that narrative is getting tired. The Indianapolis Star‘s right-of-center editorial page editor, Tim Swarens, wrote recently that “it’s hard to get worked up over news stories” about Bayh’s coordinates. Obamacare is poised to be a more significant issue than the brouhaha over where the ex-senator hangs his hat. A sign of the shift: The Star‘s editorial cartoonist, Gary Varvel, spoofed Bayh, drawing him as a doctor peeking his head into an examination room. Sitting there is a patient with a large screw marked “Obamacare” protruding from his chest. “Hey, remember me?” Dr. Bayh asks.
It’s not a question Bayh wants to answer in reality. (Bayh’s campaign didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.) He’s kept a low profile on the trail, relying on name recognition, a war chest flush with cash, and a bipartisan reputation. It’s a cautious position. And understandable—because for Bayh and the issue of the health care law, sunlight might be more of a pathogen than a disinfectant.
Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard.
