Sunday, November 17, 2013

Obamacare: There They Go Again

The vast, right-wing conspiracy, that is.  The Web site's a "disaster."  Obama "lied" about the ability to keep plans.  Therefore, scrap the whole thing and go back to Square One, and let corporate America serve as the death panels for the rest of us.

And, as always, none of this is true, even with the National Review spinning a real lie--that Obama wants to choose your health care for you, because that's the way liberals are.

The president didn't lie.  His statement applied to all then-existing health care plans, which, in turn, were grandparented into the ACA as passed--substandard requirements and all.  The cancellation letters, about which so many gigabytes have been spilled, apply to policies that were not being given this treatment, and which are being replaced by better policies at lower prices.   The letters, unfortunately, reflect the attempt by profit-seeking companies to maximize their profit margins at the expense of everyone else.  In turn, this reflects the only aspect of the ACA that should truly be considered a weakness--the fact that it essentially legitimizes health care as a profit-seeking venture, even to the point where health care companies were actively involved in writing the law.  Take a look.

There is a fair amount of "lying," however, going on here, such as the failed effort to blame the close results in the Virginia governor's election on Obamacare fallout.  There's also the fact that the cancellation letters affect, at best, six percent of all people currently insured (at least half of whom will be better off under the law).  Not to mention the ballyhoo about the Web site; apart from the fact that its problems are already about 60% fixed, it turns out that the Web site was under attack by right wingers.  Gee, what a surprise.  Imagine, right wingers not having enough faith in their ideas to let them stand or fall on their own feet.  I feel exactly the same way.  And it may not even matter if it isn't perfect by the end of this month.  It turns out that there is already a simple method for signing up for Obamacare.  It's called drugstores.

And here's something else you won't hear from the right-wing spin machine:  the Medicaid expansion by the ACA is an unqualified success, thanks in no small part to the handful of Republican governors with brains.  Gee, wasn't something like this originally proposed by liberals?  Wasn't it called something like .... like a public option?  And wasn't it precisely the conservative movement that beat that idea to death, saying that we're all better off in the hands of the profit-making companies that are now sending out those cancellation letters?  Oh, well.

You can, however, always count on the Nervous Nellies in the Democratic Party--whether they're named Mary Landrieu or Bill Clinton--to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  On the other hand, the Daily Kos may be right to suggest that something like Landrieu's bill is good politics.  It may be a vehicle for shifting the political battle away from repealing the ACA and toward improving it--something that polls support.  How about paying for the extension of bad policies by reducing subsidies to pharmaceutical companies?  Or lowering medical costs all together, by allowing non-disabled Americans under 65 to buy into Medicare--creating a public option at last?

You want to go on debating health care policy, Republicans?  Fine.  Bring it on.  If you want to make the ACA better, help the rest of us do so.  Because it's not going away.  And, for the next three years, neither is Barack Obama.  Get over it.

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