One more shot at this Affordable Care Act issue, and then I’ll shut up about it for a while. It irritates the hell out of me, to be honest, that I have to defend this product of a conservative think tank, but that’s the crossroad we find ourselves at. Just a few points:
People losing health insurance. This is a shocker, but people have always been booted out of their health plans. This is nothing new. Sure, Obama didn’t qualify his claim that people could stick with their policies if they liked them. But the media’s claim that this amounts to the President’s “Katrina moment” is simply ludicrous. All of the examples of people who have been forced off of their substandard plans have involved people who can generally afford better. One brought forward by NBC was a freaking attorney in Washington. Come on!
People never getting health insurance. While the G.O.P. and the entire mainstream media have had their hair on fire about the attorney lady who lost her catastrophic health insurance, their political allies in statehouses across the country have done everything they can to ensure that the ACA is a failure. A key component of this is refusal to expand Medicaid, which is keeping millions of working poor people from getting coverage. The reason for this is purely ideological. Louisiana governor “Bobby” Jindal complained about having more people in the cart than pulling the cart, implying that Medicaid expansion would only help the unemployed. Sure it would (and it should), but it wold also help millions of working families – people who work a hell of a lot harder than he ever has.
I’m beginning to think that Bill Clinton should have climbed aboard the ACA-type plan the Republicans were proposing back in the nineties, before they went entirely insane. At least that would have been in place, and there would have been some opportunity to improve upon it since.
As it stands now, the G.O.P. have no concrete proposal to provide health coverage to every American. Their only plan is to shoot the ACA down before it gets some traction.
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jp
it before implementation of the Affordable Care Act, sure, you can keep that dog – it’s grandfathered in. The insurance companies simply can’t continue selling those policies now that the law is in effect because – and this is important – THEY SUCK TOO BADLY, and because of that, they do not comply with the law.
Then, of course, the Austerians came to power in 2011 and set us on the righteous path of Japan in the 1990s – the path we are crawling along today on our bloody hands and knees. Millions are still out of work, millions more under-employed with zero security, many more working their asses off and still needing SNAP benefits, still needing the support of food pantries. These millions of people are now the favored target of the Austerians. If people are in need, surely it’s their fault and not the fault of policymakers who will do anything rather than invest in economic growth. SNAP has grown to $80 billion a year! they exclaim. What’s their solution? Allocate money for, say, public works projects while interest rates are low so that we can repair and replace our aging infrastructure, invest in our future, and create jobs? God, no! Cut SNAP by $40 billion.