Probably best to assume that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) won’t be running on Obamacare in his 2016 re-election campaign. The three-term Senator criticized the Democratic Party on Thursday for focusing too much on healthcare and not enough on income inequality following the global financial crisis.
Schumer spoke at the Center for American Progress, outlining his strategy for taking down the Tea Party movement by exploiting its weaknesses. During his lengthy talk, he also called out Democrats for focusing on too much on healthcare in 2008 and 2009.
“It was a worthy goal, but it wasn’t at the top of most Americans’ to-do lists,” he said of healthcare reform.
Schumer said that Americans were not against healthcare reform, but that they merely cared about more immediate needs — especially since about 90 percent of Americans already had some form of health coverage through their employers or the government.
“Their income and their lives were declining,” he said. “Healthcare didn’t address most of their immediate issues; they weren’t focused on it because they weren’t unhappy with the healthcare they had.”
The New York Senator also said that the Tea Party had controlled the rhetoric surrounding the Affordable Care Act, and Democrats had allowed them to push “false scares” about losing coverage. He did not acknowledge or address the millions of Americans who have lost their health coverage under the ACA.
During his talk, Schumer noted that things like middle-class incomes and jobs would be the focus of the 2014 election, instead of the deficit and Obamacare. Yet prominent members of the Democratic Party, including Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have said Obamacare will be a major selling point for Democrats in the midterm elections.
After his speech, a reporter pressed Schumer on his critique of the Democratic Party in regard to focusing on Obamacare. The Senator responded by reiterating that he didn’t think healthcare reform was a bad idea.
“My criticism was not in doing it … but in letting the explanation of both the Affordable Care Act, which I talked about a little bit in this talk, be predominant and ignoring the other issues that were more important to the average American,” he said.
