Martha Robertson is the Emily’s List-backed, DCCC “Red to Blue” candidate in my home district of NY-23. She is challenging Republican Tom Reed.
Robertson is a long-time, strong supporter of single payer. For years she appeared at public events arguing for single payer. She even advocated for Obamacare as a stepping stone, saying “we’ll get to single payer soon.”
During the campaign, however, Robertson has backed away from single-payer, focusing on implementing Obamacare.
Now that Obamacare’s deep problems are known, and other Democratic politicians are running from it, Robertson is standing firm.
At a recent public event held at Cornell, Robertson reiterated that her goal was to “fix” Obamacare. That was Alex Sink’s strategy in Florida District 13 recently, and it flopped.
Among the points Robertson argued is that Republicans actively sabotaged Obamacare’s rollout by underfunding the healthcare.gov website.
But we know, as reported widely, that the website problems were not for lack of funding. In fact, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on the website.
Rather, it was a lack of competent planning compounded by delays in rulemaking, so that the nature of Obamcare would be concealed from the public prior to the 2012 election.
Rather than sabotage by Republicans, the healthcare.gov debacle was sabotaged by Obama’s reelection plans. Robertson doesn’t seem to understand this.
Here’s is part of Robertson’s answer where she responded to a student question about her position on Obamacare and single-payer. Time will tell if her run towards, not away, from Obamacare works:
“House of Representatives refused to put in the kind of money that would help Human Services department needed to be able to run the website, to set up the program”* * *”The Affordable Care Act is brand new, it’s got a lot of problems. We need to fix the problems. We need to see how far we can take this.”
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