Chuck Schumer: Democrats focused on wrong problem – health care reform

Buffalo News reports:

Democrats focused on “the wrong problem” – health care reform – after President Barack Obama’s 2008 election and have been paying the price since with middle class voters who would have preferred policies that directly affected their economic struggles, Sen. Charles E. Schumer was set to say today in a stinging critique of his own party’s recent performance.

In excerpts from remarks prepared for delivery at the National Press Club, Schumer – the third-ranking Democratic senator – also hinted that Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus plan did not go far enough, and said his party lost its way after its passage.

“After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus,” said Schumer, who has represented New York in the Senate since 1989. “But unfortunately Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – health care reform.”

Schumer’s comments, coming nearly five years after a Democratic Congress passed the Affordable Care Act and a year after upwards of 10 million previously uninsured people got health coverage under the law, appear to be among the harshest self-critiques yet from any Democrat in the wake of the party’s loss of Senate control in the November election.

This is news: Schumer realizes that ObamaCare has been a disaster for the Democrat party.