December 03, 2015 03:47 PM UTC

Democrats Ready to Pounce as Republicans Try Medicaid Repeal

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• by: Colorado Pols

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may have secured enough support to attempt a half-assed Obamacare repeal that includes significant cuts to Medicaid. As Politico reports, this may not turn out well for Republican incumbents in 2016:

Putting an Obamacare repeal on the president’s desk would mark a major psychological — if not an actual — victory for Republicans. But it also could come with electoral repercussions that Democrats believe could boost their efforts to recapture the Senate in 2016.

This week, Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is poised to clinch the elusive 51 votes he needs to pass a repeal after devising a bill to appease a small group of conservative Republican senators. But the new version also would gut an expansion of Medicaid that’s put millions of Americans from low-income households on the insurance rolls.

And it just so happens that some of the most vulnerable Republicans up for reelection next year are from states that have expanded Medicaid and extended health care benefits to thousands of their constituents.

Democrats see a campaign ad that writes itself: Sen. X voted just last year to take away health insurance from tens of thousands of constituents.

Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Yuma) probably won’t see much short-term fallout from the latest effort to scrap Obamacare and Medicaid, but this narrative has the potential to inflict a serious political wound on the freshman Senator. We are reminded of a story from last March, just a few weeks after Gardner first began campaigning for the U.S. Senate, in which Gardner flat-out lies to an elderly Colorado woman who asks him about Medicaid.  Manu Raju reported on this Gardner campaign stop for Politico on March 27, 2014:

A woman on a breathing tube made clear that she was relying on Medicaid to survive.

“I was on my death bed, literally,” she told Gardner. “It kept me alive.”

“We got to protect Medicaid,” Gardner told her.

Asked about that episode later, Gardner made clear he opposed Colorado’s move to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. “I don’t know how Colorado is going to pay for it,” he said. [Pols emphasis]

It’s not difficult to see how this might be a problematic issue for Gardner as he prepares to cast an official vote to slash Medicaid.