DESTROYING THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, AND OUR CHANCE TO BE CIVILIZED

By Tom Kando

The country is hell bent on doing the wrong thing, and everyone is joining the party.

Opposition to mandatory national health care used to be primarily a Republican stance, strongest on the far right. Now, the orgy of recriminations against President Obama and the Affordable Care Act has spread to every level of society. Unaware that they are doing great harm to the long-term welfare of the American people, the mainstream media, the Internet, the Social media, nighttime talk show hosts and comedians have all joined the dance on the Titanic/lynch mob - select your metaphor.

I am fully aware that I am whistling in the wind, and that there is no way to be heard when a society is going through mass psychosis, but I will nevertheless play my customary Quixotic role and repeat some of the obvious reasons why President Obama is right and why the massive assault on Obamacare is criminal and suicidal.

The liars at Fox News, the likes of Krauthammer and Limbaugh, have won. Their indoctrination campaign has succeeded. The so-called “mainstream” has happily joined the assault. The near totality of the media and the culture at large now limit themselves  EXCLUSIVELY to bad news regarding Obamacare - the flawed website, the very low enrollment rates, Obama’s false promises, on and on. This is impartiality? It is utter and total group think. There is no more “mainstream” in America. There is only criticism, bias and anti-Obamacare ridicule nearly everywhere.

If anyone out there can briefly step out of the mass psychosis, consider (once again) the following:

1. Many other countries have long recognized health care as a basic constitutional RIGHT, not an entitlement.

2. Every civilized country in the world has a mandatory national health care system, except the United States, which seems hell bent on remaining the last bastion of feudalism. Is "exceptional backwardness" what the chauvinistic "American exceptionalists" have in mind?

3. Many of those countries enjoy longer life expectancy and better health, while spending far less on health care. As one of my readers wrote, “anyone who wants to know how (pre-ACA) American health care compares with the rest of the world needs to read "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care" by T. R. Reid. NOBODY else wants to have a health care system like ours!”

4. My 100-year old mother thrives in the Netherlands. She used to live in California. When she got older and her chances of becoming sick increased, we repatriated her to her country of citizenship. A wise move, both medically and financially.

5. Many countries enjoy the equivalent of Medicare for 100% of the population. Such a government-run, single-payer system is what this country should have had long ago.

6. We require car insurance, but not health insurance, even though the latter is much more important. After all, not everyone gets into car crashes, but sooner or later everyone becomes sick.

7. The young and healthy want to forego health insurance. They figure, they’ll sign up AFTER they get sick. That’s like saying, I’ll sign up for car insurance after my accident, and I’ll ask to collect from the insurance company then. Nuts!

8. Critics of the ACA think that they are very clever when they say, “Ha! Obama wants to sell men pregnancy insurance and women prostate cancer insurance!” This is moronic: Policies are usually standardized, not tailor-made. You get health coverage for yourself and for your dependents. You don’t cherry pick what illness each member of your family is covered for or not.

9. Reasonable Americans have tried to introduce mandatory universal health insurance for 70 years, since President Truman. Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon supported it.

10. Did the roll-out of Obamacare go badly? I don’t know where this website snafu ranks among other similar huge innovations, but let me ask this: Have you never heard of the self-fulfilling prophecy? If a program is maligned, vilified and ridiculed from the get-go, isn’t it obvious that millions will have qualms about it and hedge their bets?

11. The Republican opposition is utterly hypocritical: They are offering NO alternative, no fixes for what ails Obamacare. Their sole purpose is to destroy ANY version of universal health care, period. They want to euthanize the baby because it suffers from some infant ailments.

12. The true motives here are quite obvious: 80% of America already had some form of health insurance. Bringing the remaining 60 million people on board was too much to ask for in an increasingly selfish society. That was Obama’s mistake. He didn’t see clearly enough that the prevailing attitude in this country is: “I got mine, and if you haven’t, that’s not my problem.”

Maybe my family’s excellent experience with socialized medicine overseas cannot be replicated. It’s too late. We have become too greedy. Physicians are increasingly turning away Medicare patients. Drug manufacturers and hospitals are making insane amounts of money. Insurance companies are for-profit businesses.

It is  evil for people to profit from other people’s illnesses, but that is the essence of the American health care system. That is what Obamacare was trying to change, and what the majority of Americans apparently want to preserve. This is not the America I used to know. leave comment here