Mediaboss Marketing

Liberals on and off Capitol Hill are defending President Obama's healthcare law from the friendly fire of fellow Democrats.

The liberals say the criticisms from Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are not only flat wrong, but also pointless coming four years after the laws passage.

"I disagree with both of them," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who helped usher the bill into law as then-chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "I disagree with what they said, and I can't quite see a lot of value in it."

Schumer and Harkin both of whom played an outsized role in crafting the legislation in 2009 and 2010 have raised eyebrows in recent weeks by second-guessing the wisdom of their work.

Schumer said the Democrats' timing was poor, arguing that party leaders should have used the momentum coming out of the Democrats' 2008 election sweep to focus on bread-and-butter economic issues.

After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus, Schumer, the Senate's third-ranking Democrat, said in a Nov. 25 speech at the National Press Club. Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs not for changes in their healthcare."

Harkin took those jabs a step further this week, arguing that the policy itself is flawed because Democrats didn't fight hard enough for a public insurance option or a single-payer system, like that underlying Medicare.

We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly, and we didnt do it, Harkin, the chairman of the Senate health committee, told The Hill. So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.

What we did is we muddled through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and still rewards the insurance companies extensively, he added.

Waxman fired back, saying the ObamaCare law was the best the Democrats could do given the resistance from centrist Senate Democrats and outright opposition from Republicans.

Read more:
Liberals punch back at Dem criticism of ObamaCare