OBAMACARE MAY BE REPEALED

There is a force unleashed that may be placated; however, how that happens may surprise you.

The aim of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was three fold; number one, was to insure the uninsured; number two, was to get rid of bogus insurance policies; and number three, the biggest aim of all was to clean up the mess our free enterprise system has made of the health care.

The principle headlines have always been that the ACA would increase the number of people with health insurance, which it has done with tremendous success. Yes, there is more work to be done but so far, it looks as if we as a country are on the right road. Bankruptcies caused by not having health insurance will approach zero. Emergency rooms in hospitals around the country will no longer be filled with young accident victims, who can afford insurance but do not have it, looking for “free” health care; of course, as always, free means paid for by tax payers.

The second aim, which the government kept out of the headlines, was to stop insurance companies from cheating people by selling them useless health insurance polices. President Obama famously said, “If you have health insurance, you like; you like you can keep it”. What opened him up to insurance company directed attacks was that he didn’t say “unless it was a junk insurance policy”.  I think even the authors of the ACA had no idea of how pervasive insurance company fraud was when they wrote the legislation. People looking for cheap health insurance dumped billion of dollars into millions of fraudulent insurance policies that most of the companies were more than willing to provide. Of course, when they were exposed by the ACA, they counter attacked in dirty trick fashion; that is with the Karl “Rove-sque” fashion. The president lied! The president lied! No he didn’t he caught the insurance companies lying—big time.

The third aim of the ACA was to expose the depth of the disaster the free enterprise system created for health care in the Untied States. Almost no one but the very, very rich could actually afford health care. Sky rocketing costs cause even those people with insurance to titter on disaster. Expenses were adversely affecting or GDP: medical equipment, education, drugs, and office visits were out of control. To top it off, the insurance companies were corrupting the industry in the name of outlandish profits. It was a crisis equivalent to the worst ones Naomi Klein wrote about in her book, The Shock Doctrine.

Even though there was a Democratic congressional majority and a crisis at hand, the people had to challenge capitalism by attacking a principle industry in our capitalistic society. Our social-capitalistic society favors capitalism, which is the way our elected representatives vote, of course, supported by the insurance companies spending millions to lobby against “government interference in their business”. Even with the radical right wing screaming, they “hate Obama and his communist administration” the “blue dogs” had to vote to favor the people. To get the votes needed to pass the legislation, greed, graft, and corruption had to be exposed.

Our politicians had the entire world to look at; they saw countries were there was no health care because they were poor and countries that had socialized medicine. It was obvious that socialize medicine was working. The result was the ACA; a compromise, just as the social security act of 1935 was a compromise. However, just like the Social Security Act, it will never go away. With a Republican President and a Republican Legislature, ACA opponents my repeal “Obamacare” but they will repeal it in name only—give it a name they can claim as their own— with a few sops to insurance companies. The health care system in the Great United States has been reformed and Obama did it. 

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