Daniel TilsonIt’s time for the outcry about the rocky rollout of the Affordable Care Act to get less frantic and more targeted.
Despite corporate-conservative media personification of the law as “Obamacare,” we everyday folks need to disregard political spin and get savvy about what’s really going on.
The long-term health of our families and national economy depend on our collective objectivity, patience and will in dealing with these early, difficult days of national health reform.
If you think that’s melodramatic, check relevant statistics from recent decades.
Healthcare cost inflation spiraled wildly out of control.
Grossly under-regulated insurance companies raked in grossly over-excessive profits, while the uninsured population swelled to nearly 50 million.
Desperate people with chronic and deadly conditions were denied coverage, or had it yanked by insurers allowed to dump their costliest customers.
Millions of Americans with employer-paid coverage, or “self-insured” by low-cost bare-bones plans, or young, healthy and wanting to roll the dice with no coverage; all were under the illusion that the healthcare crisis wasn’t hurting them, that it could be solved without them having some “skin in the game.
But the cost of “uncompensated” care for uninsured millions was blowing a hole in the economy, a hole filled by escalating taxes, fees, premiums, deductibles, copayments and cost-sharing for almost everybody else. It’s called cost-shifting.
Something had to be done.
President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton tried it in the 1990s, avoiding input from Big Insurance/Pharma/Medicine, the for-profit Big Healthcare syndicate that along with “friends” in government created the healthcare crisis in the first place.
But Big Healthcare felt threatened and bankrolled an anti-reform disinformation campaign that deep-sixed national healthcare reform for another 15 years or so.
The Big got bigger and richer. The sick got sicker and poorer, countless thousands succumbing to destitution and death without health insurance.
And then came 2008.
Given the crushing weight of the healthcare crisis on the crippled economy and national psyche, Barack Obama was elected president in no small measure because he promised…Change.
Unlike the Clintons, his team played it safe by developing a reform plan in virtual partnership with Big Healthcare.
The goal was to pass something, to do whatever it took to get a first law on the books; then improve it in years to come.
What it took was letting the Big Healthcare foxes help design, administer and limitlessly profit from a new henhouse healthcare system.
With mega-rich right-wingers such as Rick Scott and the Koch brothers spending freely on a vast anti-reform disinformation campaign, Team Obama teamed up with Big Healthcare.
Proposed Medicare For All legislation that would be a national game-changer, but at the expense of Big Healthcare profit margins, was immediately relegated to “later for that” status.
A first national healthcare reform law was passed, but its success depends on voluntarily socially responsible business practices by private, for-profit Big Insurance.
Now, as UnitedHealth, Cigna and others cancel plans, price gouge, withhold information and point fingers at “Obamacare,” there’s a truly worthy target of anger.
Why waste anger on politically trumped-up, media-manipulated hysteria about a botched website launch and an ill-conceived presidential pledge?
The website was stupidly rushed online without proper testing. It’s being fixed and will work fine in time.
The president pledged people could keep health plans because Big Insurance was “grandfathering” in ones offered before the law passed. He didn’t add that insurers could stop offering plans altogether.
An error of omission from a president feeling forced to ally with rather than alienate Big Insurance? Yes, and worth being angry about — but not for long.
We need to channel our anger now into making this law work for us, starting with insisting that our president and Congress slap Big Insurance into better behavior, if not submission.
