Although the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, doesn’t do much to address the gorilla in the room – the preposterously high cost of medical care -- it does help a significant number of Americans, the heretofore uninsured, deal with those costs, and that’s a good thing. And that’s really all it does. But the ACA is now hip deep in misinformation and deliberate politically-driven disinformation about what it is and is not, to the point where its basic attributes have been rendered all but unrecognizable. (Recent surveys show that when people are asked to choose between the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare, they overwhelmingly select the ACA, even though they are one and the same thing. That says it all.)
So let’s take a few steps back and review some of the basics:
One: Health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives are fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. It’s not as if they think the status quo is fine and that Obamacare is a needless intrusion on it. So, the need is there, and that’s something that’s widely agreed upon.
Two: Although they (Boehner, et. al.) enthusiastically endorse the idea that something needs to be done, what they think that is they have not made clear. They have only said Obamacare isn’t it. There is no comprehensive alternative approach on the table. Their only “solution” is to scuttle the one initiative out there that even begins to address the problem they readily acknowledge exists.
Three. No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Romney’s program in Massachusetts is essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders.
Four: The ACA is not behind rising health care costs and the resultant rise in insurance premiums. Those were skyrocketing back when Obama was still organizing poor folks on the south side of Chicago and Obamacare was not yet a gleam in anyone’s eye. Health insurance premiums have risen almost 200 percent since 1999
Five: Despite the fact that some folks are clearly obsessed with it, it can be argued that the ACA is a relatively minor piece of legislation, not meriting all the hollering and foot-stomping it has engendered on the right. It does not affect the three out of five of us who get our health insurance through our employer, or the one in five of us who get it through Medicare. All it really does is attempt to make insurance more readily available to the one in five of us who don’t have it. That, by most estimates, amounts to about 50 million people, all of whom are one medical catastrophe removed from total financial ruin.
Six: The poorly implemented web-based process for enrolling in the program was not the same thing as the program itself, despite critics’ efforts to conflate the two. Their righteous indignation over problems with enrolling in a program they disdain was laughable. And in any case, the botched rollout of the enrollment Web site is over with and soon forgotten, and will stay that way no matter how hard and how many times Obamacare critics try to resuscitate it.
Seven: Some insurance companies canceled policies which they had sold but which didn’t comply with the new law, rendering inaccurate the president’s assurances that people could keep any policy they were happy with. It’s something of a mystery, though, why those companies – instead of precipitously canceling non-compliant policies upon implementation of the law -- didn’t communicate with the affected policyholders long beforehand, warn them of impending problems, and offer up alternatives.
Eight: It should be unnecessary to point this out because it’s all so nonsensical, but here goes: The Affordable Care Act is not a commie plot. It is not a government takeover of health care. It is not socialized medicine. It has nothing to do with socialism. Obamacare does not employ doctors or operate hospitals or provide insurance. It funnels people to insurance companies -- private enterprise – which then, in the finest tradition of free markets everywhere, compete for their business.
The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guarantees continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem all Americans share.
