By Tom Kando
I can’t stand it any longer. I HAVE to jump into the fray about Obamacare. It’s the top of the news again, now that the Supreme Court is about to rule on its constitutionality.
The outlook for Obamacare (officially called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA) is bleak. For one thing, a majority of the Supremes are conservative Republicans. Also, the suits challenging the act’s constitutionality are being filed by over half of all the states.
Every TV and radio station has been discussing the issue, offering many expert opinions. What really gets me is that according to opinion polls, a large majority of the public is against Obamacare!
What have Americans been smoking and drinking? Is this the result of brainwashing, or what?
Okay, America, let me help you out of your dismal confusion. I’ll make it short and sweet:
1. Requiring and providing universal, mandatory medical insurance is identical to requiring universal, mandatory car insurance. Anyone who is at risk and who eventually has to be bailed out by society - whether from illness or from a car accident - should be covered. And since illness is universal, health insurance should also be universal.
2. If the Supreme Court undoes Obamacare, it’ll be one of the greatest tragedies in our country’s history, a giant step backwards, guaranteeing America’s permanent status as the Western world’s laggard.
3. Every civilized country in the developed world has some form of universal, mandatory, national health plan, from Japan to Europe, from Australia and New Zealand to Canada.
4. There are many different models. A portable, single-payer health plan would have been best. Health insurance tied to your employer is not as nice. In that respect, Obamacare resembles the Swiss model (as well as the one adopted in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney’s watch) they say. But the model which America adopts is not so important. What matters is that this country finally wake up and join the rest of the world in adopting some form of universal, mandatory health insurance, that it stop such barbaric practices as excluding people with pre-existing conditions. To do less would be like returning to the Dark Ages.
5. Of all the countries of the world, America spends by far the most per capita on health care, and yet our national health is inferior to that of most other advanced nations. All health indicators show this, from life expectancy to infant mortality, from rates of heart disease to diabetes.
6. Constitutional arguments? Of course there should be a constitutional right to health care. The Courts have always treated the Constitution as an evolving and adapting document - as it must be, since it is the oldest constitution in the world. Judges have found many rights - from privacy to abortion - in the Constitution’s “penumbrae.” Many other countries have constitutions which explicitly include the fundamental right to such basic needs as health care and education. Surely our constitution should be able to accommodate such rights as well, don’t you think?
So you see, there is no argument. leave comment here
16 comments:
FINALLY someone who understands. Thanks Tom. I think most people who are against it have employer-paid healthcare with decent premiums. Don't they realize they could lose it at any time? My husband has a good job and we still pay $600 a month for healthcare. How can a young family afford that? Patty O
http://youtu.be/aR-V8WvNkkI
US corporations financing hate??
Hernan
Those who would defeat Obama (the African-American Muslim who isn't "one of us") are very, very sick.
However, it's amazing how people will vote against their own self-interest.
Too bad. There are good Constitutional grounds for upholding this law.
1. Driving is optional. No one is forced to drive. 2. Drivers can buy insurance from many insurance companies. 3. The Constitution still is the Constitution because it is quite specific and not easy to alter. If it can be "evolved" & "adapted" to whatever a majority wants, it will not long survive. So you see there is an argument.
Hi Tom,
I fully agree with your "Obamacare is a Must" but with one exception. The Swiss health care system in the first decade of the 21st Century joined the other developed nations and no longer allows "for-profit" health insurance.
The U.S. is the only "developed" nation that allows for-profit health insurance and that is one of the reasons why per-capita health care costs in the U.S. almost doubles the health care costs in all of the developed nations.
Well, Tom que sera, que sera. One might come to the
conclusion that segments of America's population are so resentful of other segments of the population
that they will vote against their own best interest, if only to deprive those they hate of a possible benefit.
Thank you for all your comments.
David makes an extremely important point - in the US, health care is a for-profit business. No wonder it has become prohibitively expensive for so many of us, as Patty (first anonymous) notes.
Tom W. mentions the politics of "resentment," which relates to Hernan's comment. I am reminded of hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh, whose hysterical style increasingly resembles that of Joe McCarthy.
Anonymous #2 and #3 both touch on constitutional issues - the former agrees with me, the latter doesn't.
Let me just say, in response to this individual, that (1) unlike driving a car, illness is NOT optional, which is what makes universal health insurance so necessary, and that (2) our constituton's survival depends precisely on its ability to evolve. As professor David Law wrote in the New York Times: Who wants tu use Windows 3.1 when Windows 7.0 is also available?
Tom, your item 4: nowadays quite a few illnesses are self-inflicted (think obesity, addiction to alcohol and/or smoking).
Insurance Co's, here as well as in the Netherlands, are now looking into raising premiums to those individuals or excluding payment for treatment of illnesses derived from it.
Can you, really, see the US of A government doing the same?
I fully agree with your other observations, tho.
I like Hans' comment very much.
Responsible behavior is of the essence. A lot remains to be done, in that regard, both in the US and elsewhere.
Americans are the worst culprits when it comes to eating habits and obesity, but on the other hand they have cut back on smoking more than others have.
I believe that the US is also Number One in drugs, but that alcohol abuse is worse in various other countries (E.g. in Eastern Europe and Russia). So there is plenty of blame for all.
And speaking of smoking, don't smokers already often pay higher premiums than non-smokers?
But, again, Hans' comments touch on a major aspect of the whole public health debate. There should be much more focus on prevention than on cure. If policy can be brought to bear on this, I am all in favor.
As a Canadian, I find the whole American health-care scene incomprehensible.
The "mandate to purchase from a provate entity" issue was known from the start. Especially in the hostile environment that has wer call "Supreme court for sale".
This is not a surprize for anyone.
I can't remember who said "Americans will do what's right, after exhausting all other options." Maybe I will live to see that day.
Thanks for your comments, Myriad and Steve. We seem to agree.
It was probably Churchill who said that, but it doesn't matter. What matters (as Steve implies) is that the US has been trying to adopt a comprehensive, public health plan for about a century, without success. We dont seem to be able to do what all other developed countries have done. Sad.
Good post, Thomas. As a Brit who has lived in the USA for nearly thirty years, like our Canadian friend I find the arguments against comprehensive healthcare incomprehensible. Those decrying Obamacare (and also Medicare & Social Security) must have been scared by a nasty ghost of Karl Marx at an impressionable age or something! I fear SCOTUS (in its most activist & reactionary incarnation) will rule the law unconstitutional. Which should galvanize progressives and liberals for the Nov election as nothing else could. But at what a cost!
yes,
I have heard it said. The silver lining.
Hopefully you are right, that the defeat of Obamacare will help Obama's re-election. But it's going to be uphill.
What depresses me is the huge number of misguided people: One of the first things which I check in the morning paper, are the letters-to-the-editors. And it seems that people opposed to Obamacare constitute a majority.
I realize that this is not a representative sample. Who knows what drives editors to select the letters they print.
But my daily newspaper is a liberal Northern California paper, and even there, judging by the letters-to-the-editors contents, the misguided ones diminate. Scary!
This seems pretty clear to me.
One of my questions is: why don't the pollers ever tell us who they polled? Was it the crowd outside the Capital? Ah, yes, but did they question both groups? Was it a phone call, so only those people who are not busy working,...etc. etc. might answer?
You get my drift.
This is one of my annoyances ever since the media started treating the results of polls as if they were the end of the discussion....not the beginning.
Thanks to Tom for being brief and giving us a broad prospective.
Terry raises an important question:
The validity of opinion polls.
Social scientists and statisticians have developed extremely sophisticated methods to assure that polls - when properly done - are highly reliable. Not since the Truman-Dewey debacle in 1948 have the polls committed a major predictive blunder.
However, there is plenty of room for shenanigans, especially by phrasing questions in certain ways.
How true are the results showing a majority of Americans opposing Obamacare?
I tend to accept these results, alas.
How did a majority of Americans come to such a sad and mistaken position?
That's a different question, for which I have no short answer, but to say that sometimes a society can - under the impact of propaganda, media bias, a spreading political culture, etc - turn the wrong way. Democracy (certainly our plutocratic sort of democracy) does not guarantee that the people will make the right decisions...
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