May the ACA Rest in Peace
Obamacare is dead and congratulations are in order for the GOP.
Since the day the law, formally known as the Affordable Care Act,
or ACA was passed in. 2010, conservatives have been doing everything they could
to weaken it, kill it, end it and be done with it.
Even though a strong majority of Americans support it, use it to
keep their medical costs down and stay healthy.
I know this personally.
In 2015, one year after full implementation of the ACA, I found
myself literally doubled over in extreme pain walking into an emergency room in
Las Vegas. As I sat there waiting to be treated, I wondered how much of my
expenses what came to be known as Obamacare would cover.
At the end of my 11 days stay, one surgery and multiple
procedures later, I got the answer, all of it. The coverage I had through the
ACA paid all my doctor bills, my hospital bills, my follow up care, everything.
And according to my doctors, those 11 days saved my life.
Not everything with the ACA is perfect. But one good thing it did
was require insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions. It
was a preexisting condition that kept my wife and I up nights, because that
reality made all the regular channels of non-employer based insurance
unaffordable to us, and millions of Americans.
That requirement, or mandate, along with forcing insurance
companies to fund birth control, contraceptives, annual physicals and routine
blood tests and screenings has saved lives, led to better health outcomes,
dramatically lowered teen pregnancy rates and cut abortions, in some states, by over 15%.
But now it is dead, a victim of thousands of little cuts. All
that’s left is to wait for the growing sepsis conservatives have sown in health
care in America to finish its task.
It did not have to be.
The ACA, the signature legislation of the first term of President
Obama had been a progressive dream for years. With a Democratic supermajority
in the Senate, the Democrats could have simply written the legislation and rammed
it through Congress. They chose not to do so.
Knowing real success would need buy-in from the other side of the
aisle and a skeptical American people, the administration fanned out across
Washington and the country to seek input and improvements in the projected
plan.
In addition to over 60 bi-partisan official House discussions in
chamber, there were also over 100 official Senate hearings held in Washington.
Hundreds of amendments were offered with some becoming part of the new
legislation. Members of Congress all across the country held town halls to get the pulse and opinion of
people before the legislation was enacted.
In short, the process was public, done with regular order, negotiated between parties with
substantial input from stakeholders. Additionally, amendments were offered and
considered, all before the law was passed.
And then the empire struck back. Almost immediately conservatives
began looking for ways to eliminate the ACA. In fact, the GOP plan was to kill
it before it took effect and Americans came to like, rely on it and see that
worked. All of which has come to be true in the last ten years.
Conservatives, however, have now voted more than 70 times to
partially or fully repeal the ACA. President Trump has repeatedly lied, telling
America his plan is “coming in two weeks”, “a few weeks”, “next week” and a
“few days .” House Speaker Johnson has repeatedly lied saying the GOP has “a lot
of” health care plans.
None of that is true. Instead, the conservatives of the GOP,
egged on by their partisan supporters, have been working for 15 years to weaken
the ACA to such a point that it no longer works, and then claim its inability
to function requires it to be eliminated.
And their plan, despite a majority of Americans approving of the
ACA, has worked like a charm.
Contrast the conservative approach with how progressives worked
alongside President Bush to improve Medicare to cover prescriptions for
medicines during his term. When that program needed improving, the Dems worked
with the President to make sure it happened.
We saw no effort from conservatives to work to improve the ACA,
with the single exception being Senator John McCain who refused to end the program
during the first Trump term.
The simple truth is this:
Conservatives have for years, dating back to at least Senator
Robert Taft’s run for the GOP nomination in the 1940s and '50s have railed
against progressive legislation. Taft would feel right at home in today’s GOP
as he stridently supported limited government and non-interventionist foreign
policy.
Taft, while initially supporting Social Security and other
programs during the Great Depression, came to believe those programs encouraged
dependence on the federal government.
Then in the 1960s, conservatives used the same language to oppose
Medicare, which President Johnson signed into law in 1965. Today conservatives
see these entitlement programs that have helped lift millions of Americans out
of poverty, and help them be healthy in retirement, as robbing people of their
freedoms.
Finally, we come to what may be the real reason the Trump
Administration has set its sights on the elimination of the popular ACA. It’s
not because it’s imperfect, doesn’t work or doesn’t meet the needs of the
American people. It’s not because the administration believes government should
not be involved in private industry.
Not at all. The real reason the Trump Administration wants the
ACA repealed is because it has become known as Obamacare, and our president is
a petty, jealous man. How do we know the man who had to be shielded from seeing
the name John McCain on a United States Navy aircraft carrier does not like the
name Obamacare?
Because over the last few days he’s been posting and sharing his
belief a new plan should be called “Trumpcare”.
All of this brings us to today.
Earlier this year, conservatives passed a budget in the House to
eliminate millions of dollars of subsidies for the ACA. They knew doing so
without a plan to cover low income people would lead to havoc and families
losing their healthcare, but they did so anyway.
Angry over this, progressives initially refused to go along, and
our government was shut down. Ultimately though, we all knew where this was
headed. The progressive Dems simply did not have the cards or the votes to win
this fight.
This week a handful of Dems gave up the fight.
It was not worth it they said, to crash the entire air traffic
system the Trump Administration was shutting down. It was not worth it they
said to continue to try and force the Trump Administration to abide by a SCOTUS
ruling and provide millions of Americans the help they needed to put food on
their tables. It was not worth it, they said, to continue to expect government
workers, except Congress, to go without pay.
It was not worth it, but it is what cnservatives were willing to
do to America so people could be free, finally they will say, of the ACA and so
President Trump does not have to say “Obamacare”.
Now that the shutdown is over, we can get back to business. The
House must now, unless Speaker Johnson has another exception, officially swear
in and seat Representative-elect Grijalva of Arizona. That will force a vote
Johnson does not want, to release the Epstein files.
Then, in short order I am sure, we can finally see the plan
Speaker Johnson said could only be put forward and revealed once the ACA
subsidies were ended. The time is now here for the Speaker and conservatives to
show their hand.
Unless, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene says, that plan does not
exist.
In which case, millions of Americans are now
needlessly screwed, but free.
