Will Health Care Reform Save Obama?

Three critical swing states just offered a lavish present to Barack Obama. According to a Washington Post poll, Florida, Ohio and Virginia put their health coverage — sacred reform of the Obama mandate — at the top of their concerns, together with the economy. Seventy percent want to keep Medicare — the current social insurance system, covering 49 million senior citizens — in the public sector. Even with the reform. And that’s not all: They prefer that Obama continues to manage the system.

Since keeping Medicare usually means keeping Obama (50/45), it’s an enormous fiasco for the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan — chairman of the House Budget Committee — in particular, because he must convince Americans of the importance of leaving the mandatory public system and moving to individual choice in his health insurance system. In order to save money. Do you remember him with his mother in a retirement home? At that point, the states polled remembered that Medicare was popular and that Paul Ryan’s proposal to switch to health vouchers could be seen as complicated, uncertain and worrying. The Republicans have underestimated the psychology of senior citizens — and their children.

This does not mean that the subject of health reform is not at the center of intense debate. And it is also certain that the considerable number of voters over age 65 in Florida (one in five in 2008) explains the conformity of attachment to the existing system, legitimized to a certain extent by the Supreme Court decision before summer 2012. But if he wanted to win, Romney’s challenge was to convince a very large number of senior citizens who seemed as though they were not going to vote for Obama. Given this target, Medicare will not be a rallying point against Obama. Paul Ryan’s crusade might have ended up working for Obama instead.