I've heard a lot of people saying if Sanders doesn't get the nomination they won't vote, or they'll vote Green Party. It makes me wonder if their personal risks are limited. The risk is to ACA. (The Affordable Health Care Act) is dire. Is ACA perfect? No, far from it. It's a mess, filled with holes and huge problems, but that’s not the subject I want to tackle.
When someone tells me ACA is a catastrophe and is a burden on small business owners or costs them more, I have 3 reactions.
The first reaction is yes, an employer based health insurance system is a burden on business although it does provide the opportunity for decent health insurance with the costs shared by individuals and businesses, for people with full time employment. As a small business owner before ACA, the costs of providing coverage for my 150 employees was incredibly high and the rate of cost increase each year was astronomical. Administrating the coverage was very costly as well. Unfortunately this is the only way to acquire coverage and you couldn't just have coverage for the principals in a company, although you could have distinct benefits set aside for them. Its also important to note that the options for small companies operating nationally were just awful. The smaller your company, the higher the costs and there were fewer options. This was before ACA! In other words it was a crap system for business from the get go.
The second reaction I have is prior to ACA we had no alternatives. Individual plans were prohibitively expensive and getting an individual plan with pre-existing conditions was impossible Finally, you could be canceled and left with no options at all. Before I owned my own company I spent 10 years as a freelancer with no health care coverage at all.
My third reaction is that by arguing against ACA you fit into one of three areas: You have insurance and a stable job thus the privilege to vote your “values”, or you are a small business owner and don’t want to provide coverage, or you aren’t willing to pay something for coverage unless you are sick. Now there are holes in the system which create massive burdens for certain economic groups, and this must be fixed although Congress has little impetus to do so.
My point is this: we can argue about Clinton, Sanders, Trump, Cruz or Rubio, but the three republicans will eliminate health insurance for 20 million people on Jan 20th 2017. The two democrats will let us continue down the path of improving it. If you are ready to lose your ACA insurance next year or deny it to all the others, then you're not compelled to vote for any of these people. If you have insurance and don’t care about those who will lose it, you can vote your privilege and let us go without. If you're young, growing up in the gig economy you can roll the dice and go without coverage and shirk your social responsibility in favor of your ideals, you have that right. If your ideals and values are such, that the lives of others hanging in the balance are simply collateral and you must vote your conscience that’s just wrong. Protecting the Affordable Care Act and improving it, is a social justice issue, because we are progressing down this have and have nots path with relentless speed, ACA was a bump in that road.
Do the insurance companies, big pharma and the medical industrial complex have us over a barrel? Yes. Let’s work on that starting in 2017. The bigger question I have for those who feel disenfranchised if their candidate loses the nomination is, are you willing to sacrifice other people's lives for your values? If you don't vote in November the answer is yes!