I’m wondering if the left and right are taking the opposite positions they should on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). If President Obama wins, health insurance remains a for-profit commodity pushing single payer back for decades to come. If the right wins and overturns ACA, a European style single payer model will get a huge political boost.
There is a great deal of irony in how the parties have aligned themselves in choosing sides on ACA. The ACA is a market solution and largely a copy a plan originally proposed by the conservative Republican Heritage Foundation. Exchanges are all about free enterprise competition. Sure there is some government oversight to protect consumers from ripoff companies but that is what governments should do. The government requires safety features for automobiles, airplanes, and building codes. Lead is now banned from paint and there are rules for electrical wiring in homes and public buildings. There are limits on rat feces in our breakfast cereals and the amount of mercury allowed in our water. The ACA is no more socialist or communist than our grocery stores or auto dealers and manufacturers.
The market aspect is a major reason polls find that as many as one in three or four who don’t like ACA, don’t like it because health care is treated as a commodity to profit from rather than as a basic civil right.
If there is one thing this debate has accomplished, it is that people realize the rest of the world treats their citizens different. They don’t have the concept of “preexisting conditions” to deny citizens coverage. In fact, people in other nations think the concept of preexisting conditions is an immoral creation of the money grubbing SuperRich. And polls how find Americans, even those who don’t like the ACA, don’t want to return to the days of preexisting conditions. Nor do they want to kick their kids under 26 years old off their insurance. People overwhelmingly dislike annual and lifetime limits or letting companies cancel your insurance when you get sick. In fact, when polled on specific features of ACA, Americans love everything but the individual mandate. This Republican idea was billed a encouraging “personal responsibility” until President Obama agreed to the idea.
Let’s assume Republicans are able to destroy the ACA. Now what? People love all those cool things they now know citizens in other nations get? Can we just go back to the horrible system we had? Probably not. The genie is out of the bottle. If we cannot have those things with a market based solution, the next movement will be to lower the age for Medicare coverage from 65 year olds to 1 day olds.
Whatever your political position on this issue, you might consider switching sides.