For months, Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn has worked hard to keep out of the line of fire while her potential GOP opponents fling mud at each other. However, that changed briefly last week when Nunn was asked whether she would have voted for Obamacare if she had been in the Senate in 2009.
It’s a legitimate question, one that voters, the media and her opponents have every right to ask Nunn and will continue to ask Nunn. After all, the passage of Obamacare represents the most important legislative initiative in a decade if not in several decades. But Nunn didn’t want to answer it, and she didn’t handle it well:
NUNN: “So at the time that the Affordable Health Care Act was passed, I was working for Points Of Light. I wish that we had had more people who had tried to architect a bipartisan legislation.”
Reporter: “So, yes or no?”
NUNN: “So, you know, I think it’s impossible to look back retrospectively and say ‘what would you have done when you were there?’”
Well, if she won’t answer the question, someone should: Yes, of course she would have voted in favor of Obamacare. Every Democrat then in the Senate voted in favor of it, including those from conservative red states such as Arkansas, North Dakota and Louisiana. Nunn would have as well.
Why? Because it gets down to basic values:
In a society as rich as our own, is access to health care a human right? For many Americans, and for most Democrats, the answer is a clear yes. We simply are not willing to keep tens of millions of our fellow Americans outside the health-care system simply because they can’t afford it or because pre-existing conditions make it impossible to ensure them at a profit. Our shared humanity means we can’t deny health care to those people.
For Republicans, it’s a bit more complicated. Many tend to agree, at least theoretically, that health care is a basic human right. They don’t want to see themselves — and they don’t want to be seen by others — as a party that would deny health care to the sick and injured. However, if wider access to health care comes at the price of government intervention, then the equation changes. I think it’s fair to say that as they view the world, the evil of bigger government outweighs the evil of millions without access to health care. It’s just too high a price to pay.
That’s why, even after all this time, there is no “replace” in “repeal and replace.” Ask a Republican politician about their plan to replace Obamacare, and you get the same type of mumbling, halting response that Nunn provided, and for the same reason: It is a question they do not want to answer.
In other settings, Nunn has given a somewhat better answer to the Obamacare question, even if she still dodges its main thrust. For example, she directly endorses the expansion of Medicaid to the 500,000 or more working-class Georgians who are still being denied coverage by state leaders. She also notes the many Georgians whom she has met who say that thanks to Obamacare, they now have coverage for the first time. It’s an implicit acknowledgment that even if the law has flaws that need to be fixed, it’s a legitimate role for government to play.
But “implicit” is as far as she’s willing to go.
