WASHINGTON — With a health care overhaul inching closer to reality, Democrats looking to the 2010 midterm elections plan to market the bill as a way to help voters who are focused more on unemployment and the economy.
The chances of passing health care legislation rose significantly Monday, with a Senate vote that put it on track to clear the chamber by Christmas. And so party strategists are shifting gears.
“We can’t just pass it,” pollster Celinda Lake said. “We have to sell the plan.”
A sour public mood, however, may make matters tough for Democrats, whose comfortable congressional majority will be at risk. Recent polls have shown that voters are impatient with incumbents and that the economy is their overriding concern.
“They’ve been talking about everything but what voters are most concerned about,” said Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, of the Democratic leadership.
In the face of arguments that they have been focused on a second-tier concern, Democrats intend to stress that jobs and health care — which accounts for one-sixth of the economy — are inseparable. The bill will allow businesses that have been burdened by rising insurance costs, proponents say, to become more competitive in a global economy.
In addition, party leaders hope to minimize concerns that many of the bill’s provisions would not take effect until 2014. That is when, for example, a new health insurance marketplace would open, making it easier for consumers to find and buy policies.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are compiling lists of “immediate benefits” that would spring from passage of the bill — which still must emerge from the Senate and be reconciled with a version approved by the House of Representatives.
One would be the small-business tax credit to help employers pay for coverage. Another immediate “deliverable” added by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., would ban denying coverage to children based on pre-existing conditions. Under the Senate bill, insurers would be barred from denying coverage to adults based on pre-existing conditions in 2014.
Also, insurance companies would be banned immediately from setting lifetime benefit caps. Under the Senate bill, insurers also could not rescind a policy because the beneficiary was filing claims.
“While it will be a few years before the insurance exchange is set up, there are a number of very important protections that go into place right away,” White House communications director Daniel Pfeiffer said Monday. “These are things that the majority of folks who have health insurance are very concerned about.”
The Senate bill also would extend insurance coverage to 30 million additional people.
Democrats hope these provisions will resonate in a bad economy, when voters are worried about losing their jobs and seeing their coverage disappear.
Yet Republicans also see health care as a winning campaign issue, and they believe that the more Americans hear about the bill, the less they will like it. That is why they have been emphasizing the bill’s tax increases and Medicare cuts and the cumbersome legislative process — which voters tend to dislike.
A CNN poll showed that although the public’s view of the Senate bill was improving, 56 percent of respondents still opposed it; 42 percent said they supported it.
