Rational Ignorance, Obamacare, and Political Parties

The Affordable Care Act has never been popular among American voters; as recently as September of this year, only about 1 out of 3 voters support the law. Given that only a minority of Americans have ever held a favorable view of of the law, and assuming that our elected representatives vote in our interests, it is understandable why some would be puzzled that such an unpopular piece of legislation managed to pass both houses of congress. In class last week when we covered the issue of shirking, one of the factors that we discussed that contributes to this problem was rational ignorance of the issues at hand on the part of the voters. If the recently uncovered statements of Jonathan Gruber, a key architect of Obamacare, are indicative of the senate democrats' opinion of the average American voter, then it appears that those senators were largely relying on rational ignorance when they voted in favor of Obamacare despite the will of the majority of voters.

However, unfortunately for Gruber, the Obama administration, and essentially every politician associated with the law, "rational ignorance" is not the phrase that was used in the multiple video clips that have surfaced of Gruber insulting American voters' intelligence. Some highlights include: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass”. As well as the admission that “We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter”. If the senators who voted in favor of the law shared these sentiments, then this could explain why they thought that they could vote against the wishes of most Americans and not be punished for it. Still, I think that there is another factor that contributed to the passage of the Affordable Care Act that Weingast and Marshall would presumably disagree with.

In discussing the organization of congress, Weingast and Marshall's second assumption is that political parties "place no constraints on the behavior of individual representatives". I would argue that this statement is not entirely accurate, at least as far is the current group of senators is concerned. I believe that the clearest evidence of this is the fact that Obamacare passed in the senate in a purely partisan manner: each of the 58 democrats in the senate voted in favor of the healthcare overhaul. Of the 40 republican senators, 39 voted nay with the 40th not voting at all. I find it difficult to believe that we would have seen such flagrant party-line voting on an issue as controversial as the government takeover of healthcare if political parties did not have considerable influence over how individual representatives vote, especially considering that senators from states like North Carolina and Louisiana, where Obamacare is deeply unpopular, voted in favor of the law anyway. 

Most of what I have written so far seems pessimistic: the American people are currently forced to live under a law that the majority do not want, because their elected representatives rely on them being ignorant on the bills they vote on, and as a result not monitoring them as critically as they probably should. That the current batch of senators appears willing to vote the party line instead of their constituents' preferences is similarly discouraging. But recent events may have provided us with a bright spot: Even if shirking is out of control and partisan politics are on the rise, it appears that Americans may be holding their congressmen and women more accountable than some of those senators had banked on. When the senate reconvenes in 2015, no less than 15 democrats who voted for obamacare back in 2010 will find their seat occupied by a republican. While this change is not entirely due to the gains that Republicans made earlier this month, it is still a significant shift to occur only 5 years, and will hopefully serve as a warning to congress that American voters might not be as ignorant as Mr. Gruber seems to think.