After The United States Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, Facebook, Twitter and thousands of websites across the Internet were overwhelmed with comments. Many of those comments were about outrage and showed a great deal of anger from many Americans who think the bill is a government takeover of the health care system. They’re all wrong; it is anything but a government takeover.
The Affordable Care Act is a boon for the health insurance industry. What the bill does is hand over to the insurance industry, millions of new customers. What we, the American people get out of it is a guarantee that no longer will we be denied health care and no longer will pre-existing conditions keep any of us from getting health care.
Another aspect of the bill is that health insurance agencies can no longer put a cap on how much a health care policy will pay out over a lifetime. If one of your family members or you get sick and needs care for even the rest of yours, or their lives, you all will be covered.
Now we could have paid for the bill by entirely taking health care off of the market and turning it into a single-payer system. A single-payer system would be much cheaper; as this is what many of our democratic allies around the world have and their health care systems are a lot less expensive than ours.
Instead, because of the desire to get Republicans on board when it was moving through the Congress, Democratic lawmakers accepted a compromise by including the mandate to pay for it. The mandate was originally a Republican idea, back during the health care debates over Hillary Clinton’s plan in the early 90s.
Unfortunately, Democrats couldn’t get Republicans on board at all, even with the compromise. Then once the mandate became the Democrat’s plan to pay for it, Republicans used it as a weapon against Democrats and President Barack Obama by stirring up the opposition and painting the bill as socialism and communism.
It wasn’t difficult for the Republicans to turn the bill over on its head with the help of the Tea Party crowd. When you tell healthy people that they will have to buy their own health insurance, it obviously is going to upset a lot of people. People tend to think of their own self-interest for the present and they don’t really think about what the future implications of what the health care bill will mean to them.
Certainly, a lot of young and healthy Americans are going to have to pay for health care they may not need for decades to come. But then, that health care will be there for many of them who do have an unexpected health care crisis through sickness or a serious accident.
For the rest who stay healthy and don’t need the health care they’re paying for, the day will come that they will need it when they’re older. Plus, the benefit of having free preventive-medicine medical examines – another part of the bill – may save them from having to deal with devastating diseases and health conditions later in life because they were caught early, thanks to preventive medicine.
One thing I do know, with the announcement that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act there might have been a lot of outrage, but I also know that it brought forth many tears of joy by those who have suffered because of our past broken health care system and those who still face all manners of health care problems that in many cases have destroyed lives.
Many of those who have had to mortgage their homes and give up their retirement savings, in order to pay for the health care of a loved one, were overwhelmed with relief that now, the bill will stay intact and they will no longer be faced with bankruptcy.
My own joy, being an older man who’s still several years away from qualifying for Medicare and concerned that a health condition could destroy my finances along with not being able to work anymore. Then the health care bills coming in that I could never afford to pay, destroying my credit and my livelihood while I suffer from whatever health crisis has brought me to that point.
Personal responsibility is not only a conservative idea but a good idea. Those who can afford their own health care should because it shouldn’t be the taxpayers and those who do have health insurance to pay for everyone who doesn’t.
With the old system, when someone who doesn’t have health insurance shows up in an emergency room because of some unexpected health crisis, it means that everyone else paid for that person’s health care if that person can’t afford the out-of-pocket cost. With the new health care law, that individual will most likely have health insurance and if not, they’re at least paying a tax that will help cover the cost of their health care.
I do think that as the health care bill is implemented more, more Americans will see it as a good thing. Our Congress hopefully will work together to improve the bill so that it better serves all Americans. Cost I believe will begin to go down, that is if Congress keeps a rein on the health care insurance industry and the health care industry, especially over the long haul thanks to what preventive medicine will do for the overall health of this nation.
ObamaCare, as it’s now called, is here to stay and America finally has a health care plan for everyone, including me.
This is a republish from my website: Fidlerten Place