Re: ObamaCare

Once again, the GOP noise machine and their slobbering mainstream media sycophants are fully revved-up about ObamaCare.  Flush with their victories and newly gained majorities in Congress and the Senate, they are making yet another assault on a program that has signed up more than eight million people.  That's eight million folks who for various reasons, wouldn't otherwise have access to health insurance.  In our pay for play, everything for a buck system, that translates to eight million souls who wouldn't have access to any kind of meaningful health care.

Now if you think that from the tone of the previous paragraph, this is just another defend the Affordable Care Act article, you just might be wrong!  Just because the GOP and many conservative sock puppet “organizations” (that are really thinly veiled operations financed by billionaires) have been making endless politically motivated attacks on ACA, it doesn't mean that the way ACA was “compromised” down from a potentially single-payer plan didn't create legal and ethical holes in it that invited those attacks!  Although to his credit, President Obama is the first President to seriously address what amounts to a health care crisis in our nation and actually get a law passed covering people under sixty five, I resent that he made almost every aspect of it negotiable.  The more he compromised, the more the GOP and those sock puppet organizations found fault with it and said so in endless TV propaganda ads.  Which reminds me of one of my favorite sayings, “No good deed shall go unpunished.”  Although ACA did some great things like preventing insurance corps from rejecting people for pre-existing conditions, the finished product was a compromised to death shadow of itself!

Here's some of what's wrong with the Affordable Care Act from my perspective:

• If ACA was written as a single-payer, all in plan and presented as potentially solving a national health, safety and fiscal crisis, it would have been virtually invulnerable to a legal attack because  no one would be forced by our government to buy insurance from a private corporation.  Also, our government would be using our tax dollars to pay for everyone's health care, instead of paying subsidies that go into the coffers of insurance corps.
  
• ACA had too much leeway that allowed certain red state governors to shall we say, do their best to gum up the works.  Because of that, the residents of many red states had a rougher time getting insured & some red states didn't accept funding for Medicaid expansion for lower income folks, which left some people out in the cold.  Additionally, a certain chrome-domed governor and the state legislature of a state that is famous for growing both oranges and hanging chads, passed a law a couple of years ago that prevents the Florida Insurance Commissioner from regulating health insurance rates on the grounds that the feds do so under ObamaCare.  The problem is the feds don't have that authority, but state insurance commissioners do.  Could the fact that Florida's Insurance Commissioner is legally barred from doing his job be the real reason for the sharp second year rise in insurance rates there???
  
• ACA included a tax penalty on what Barack Obama referred to as “Cadillac plans.”  This tax is payed by insurers and employers, which could discourage them from providing that level of insurance.  The problem with that is many comprehensive, so called “Cadillac plans” were negotiated Union benefits in lieu of pay increases.  We're not talking about Cadillacs and insurance for the well off here, in many cases, we're talking about Joe and Jane working guy and gal's hard won and earned insurance!  Incidentally, Obama also referred to the Federal Healthcare Marketplace's Platinum Level plans as “Cadillac Plans.”  I resent Obama characterizing a health plan that covers most medical services and doesn't have a large number of major gaps in its coverage that could leave a family with a crushing medical debt, which could drive them into bankruptcy as being a “Cadillac plan.”  In countries that take better care of their citizens, places that don't put a price on a patient's health, even our “Cadillac plans” are stingy by comparison. 
  

 I could continue for pages but in the interest of brevity, I won't.  Let's just end things by saying that if the purpose of health care reform is to actually provide health care for every person in our country, than we needed single-payer health care.  If the purpose of health care reform is to really control the rising costs of health care, than we need to nationalize every aspect of health care and transform it from a big corporate business to a profession!  As things now stand, ObamaCare is basically the health care version of trickle-down economics.  It looks out for the interests of insurance corps. first by providing them with a mandated by law customer base and leaves those customers with ever increasing premiums!  Come to think of it, didn't trickle-down also happen when Wall St. and the banksters were bailed out, while ordinary folks remained unemployed? Food for thought, huh?

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