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To be sure, there was once a time when destroying Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act, was a winning issue for Republicans. For the first few years after the marquee health-care law passed in 2010, many voters despised it. The law’s favorability was underwater in almost every poll for the first six years of its existence.

Such disdain had relatively little to do with what the law actually did. Yes, there was a small slice of the population angered by the loss of cheap, threadbare health coverage that was being phased out. A few other critics had philosophical objections to the law’s objectives — i.e., whether the government should even try to guarantee universal access to insurance, or to specific kinds of health-care services.

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But for the most part, it was the GOP’s fearmongering campaigns that gave the law a black eye. Obamacare was a technical and complicated suite of programs, and government complexity is generally an opportunity for demagogues. So demagogue Republicans did, convincing Americans that this scary new statute would kill not only jobs and federal budgets, but somehow even your beloved grandma, too. (Remember “death panels”?)

None of these things came to pass. And while the Obamacare brand might have been unpopular, most of Obamacare’s actual provisions were well-liked. Nearly every major plank of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — such as guaranteeing coverage to people with preexisting conditions, expanding Medicaid, and allowing children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans for longer — was and continues to be favored by the public.

It took a while for Americans to connect the dots between the law’s name and its popular provisions. Specifically, it took a potent threat of repeal, when Republicans gained control of the presidency in 2017 to go along with majorities in both chambers of Congress. The GOP repeatedly tried to “repeal and replace” the law, but could not come up with anything that would prevent millions of Americans from losing care.

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Ultimately, Republicans were unable to muster the votes to dislodge the ACA. What they did do was scare voters straight about what losing it would mean. Ever since these failed efforts, Obamacare has consistently garnered more favorable than unfavorable views from the public (59 percent to 40 percent in the most recent KFF poll, from May).

This has been an unequivocal boon to Democrats, who regained control of the House after the 2018 midterms largely by promising to safeguard health coverage. Red states have also increasingly been hopping on the ACA bandwagon, often as a result of popular-ballot measures to expand Medicaid.

Most Republican politicians have now figured out that talking about health care is a........

© Washington Post