Politics

Harry Reid: ‘We Never Recovered from the Rollout’ of Obamacare

By Daniel Halper
Published December 10, 2014 12:01pm ET
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There’s more Obamacare bashing from the political left today. This time it’s from outgoing Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

As he tells a New York Times reporter:

In hindsight, Mr. Reid said, it was easier to see how damaging the mismanaged rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges had been. “We never recovered from the rollout because the election became one that was directed toward the president. We couldn’t overcome that,” he said. Still, he added, “I should have seen it coming.”

This follows Chuck Schumer, another leading Senate Democrat, who criticized Obamacare recently, too.

“After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus, but unfortunately Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform,” Schumer said in November.

The third-ranking Senate Democrat noted that just about 5 percent of registered voters in the United States lacked health insurance before the implementation of the law, arguing that to focus on a problem affecting such “a small percentage of the electoral made no political sense.”
The larger problem, affecting most Americans, he said, was a poor economy resulting from the recession. “When Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought, ‘The Democrats aren’t paying enough attention to me,’ ” Schumer said.

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