How much did health care votes cause democratic defeats?

"In the end, it may have mattered less whether vulnerable Democratic incumbents voted for or against the health care law than that they simply had a D by their names," The New York Times reports. "Among 22 who provided crucial yes votes from particularly risky districts, 19 ended up losing on Tuesday. That included all five members who voted against a more expensive House version last November and then changed their votes to support the final legislation in March. But even the Democrats who bucked the White House and their party's leadership by voting against the measure gained little protection. Of the 30 Democrats who opposed the final bill and then stood for re-election, 17 lost anyway" (Sack, 11/4).

The Washington Post: The elections "provided zero clarity" on whether Democrats dug "their own graves by passing the unpopular health-care bill last year. … Some Democrats concede privately they missed two key signs that the health-care bill, at least as it had taken shape, would be a very tough sell to voters. In the summer of 2009, Sen. Charles Grassley (R), a chief GOP negotiator, abruptly backed away from the process, in part because he was hearing rumblings of a potential primary challenger back home in Iowa. And in January, Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory in a special election to fill the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's Massachusetts seat. One of Brown's pledges: to drive a stake in health-care reform."

Meanwhile, "[a]t a White House news conference on Wednesday, President Obama said he had no regrets about the health-care bill, although he acknowledged that the process was messy and off-putting, with all the deals Democrats cut with health-care industry groups and individual lawmakers who sought concessions in exchange for their votes" (Murray, 11/3). 

---

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.