Lanhee J Chen, Columnist

Runaway Obamacare Spending Will Cost Democrats

A new study out this week from Bloomberg Government threatens to bring the Affordable Care Act back to center stage.

September 26, 2014 at 3:51 PM UTC

Lanhee Chen is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who also teaches public policy at Stanford University. He was the policy director of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign. Chen was a senior official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the George W. Bush administration. He practiced business litigation with the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and served as the Winnie Neubauer visiting fellow in health policy studies at the Heritage Foundation. Chen earned his doctorate and master's degree in political science from Harvard University, his law degree from Harvard Law School and his bachelor's degree in government from Harvard College.

Remember this? Voters will.
Photographer: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

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As we start the final stretch before the midterm elections, many analysts are convinced that Obamacare isn't the hot political issue it once was. While the flood of negative publicity about the law has subsided of late, a majority of people still oppose it, according to a Real Clear Politics average of polls taken from Sept. 2-15. And I’ve always believed the voters’ negative impressions of the law were “baked” into their assessments of Democratic incumbents.

That’s partly why Democratic Senators such as Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Begich of Alaska find themselves barely breaking 40 percent in recent public polls.