The Legacy of Obamacare

Published in The Catalyst

When reviewing the presidency of Barrack Obama, historians will without-a-doubt regard the passage of nationwide health insurance reform as a trademark legislative accomplishment of the Democrat's short-lived control of Congress. According to most recent polls conducted on the matter, when asked about the bill’s details, most Americans now have favorable opinions of the core specifics, while approval for the legislation, as a whole remains curiously low. A CBS News poll found that 44% of Americans feel they don’t know enough about the details of the bill, but when asked if they support a provision that permits post-college-age children to remain on their parents' insurance plan or if they support the prevention of insurance companies from denying care, approval for both is well above 60%. The same poll also found that far more Americans support the health insurance reform than the GOP's de-funding plan to repeal the legislation entirely.

Why has the bill been slowly gaining popularity, you may wonder? A report from the typically conservative Congressional Budget Office determined that the bill would reduce the nation’s debt over 10 years and sharply expand insurance coverage. Another CBO report found that a repeal of the bill would add $230 Billion to the deficit. Another reason the bill has gained popularity is that as its implementation has prevented providers from denying patents life-saving assistance due to a pre-existing condition and more and more people have voiced their approval for this measure as they have begun to realize how blatantly moral and logically inarguable it is.
             Unfortunately for the United States, far too little was done to stop it from continuing to spend way, way more than any nation in the Universe on health care. Health care bills remain the leading cause of bankruptcy for Americans, and as our system stands now, taxpayers are forced to fund unsustainable band-aids like Medicare, which is the greatest single expense ($543 billion a year) of the national deficit. Congress faced a choice between implementing what most Americans view as a vital public option, (a move which, most economists would argue, could have curbed health care spending to an unimaginable degree) and an unpopular implementation of insurance mandates, the choice of the Democratic party has left America alone yet again, remaining the only developed country on the planet without some form of universal health care. 
             While these two narratives are likely to make it in the pages of future classroom textbooks on American History, the role president Obama had in painting a post-passage portrait of the bill will probably remain unchallenged. The disturbingly undeniable reality of the choice congress faced between a public option and public mandates was that the insurance companies ever-powerful corporate lobby used it's abundance of wealth to sway Democrats. The agenda of the lobbyists was to ensure nothing was done to stop the flow of money from the insured majority into their pocketbooks. Thus, while Obama consistently speaks of the bill as taking us a step closer to universal health care, the exact opposite remains true. Those happiest about the passage of so-called “Obamacare” are the insurance companies, who, thanks to the mandate on Americans to buy into an insurance plan, will have millions more customers to exploit and profit from.
Mandates make the likelihood of universal health care all the more unrealistic and, if we have learned anything from America’s legislative history, the chance of a congressional re-visitation of health Care is tremendously slim. What the bill represented, as I have said in the past, was a ‘quick fix now and not worries about it for decades' method of reform.

If I may pull out a cliché here, allow me to quote MLK. In the words of Martin Luther King, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane”. While I would try to rally the troops with a hopeful conclusion that we must demand justice from our government until health care becomes a human right, I do recognize how easy it is for the right to demonize advocates for change. They claim “socialized medicine” will lead us down a path of “death panels”, “rationed care” and eventually “big government communism”. Tragically, there are so very many reasons why these baseless attacks work, and while you might guess that the power of fear is the presiding factor, I would argue it’s lack of education. Most Americans support implementing a public option. But, if Americans are simply asked if they support government-run socialized medicine, obviously lack of sufficient education plays its role in the “well of course not” response nearly every Jane Doe and Joe Schmo replies with to the satisfaction of the person who asked the question. So, while it may not be as inspiring or optimistic as a declaration of action, I say, use words, use film, use stats, use personal experiences, use whatever you have got- and inform people. Over time, they will begin to crave health care justice hopefully as much as you already do. And over time, government will listen. It won’t happen overnight, but, like it’s happened in every other developed nation on earth, it will, I firmly believe, happen here.