The Rob has a historical, blue-toned take on the recent passage of the Health Care reform initiative (dubbed "ObamaCare" by its detractors)…but as you know, that's not exactly how we roll here at Obsidian Potency. In general, we look at things through either a racial lens, a pragmatic lens, or both. Fortunately for those of you who are uncomfortable with discussing (potential) racial issues, health care isn't so much a racial issue as it is a pragmatic one.
Is this bill exactly what the American people wanted? No. The people seemed to want a single-payer health care system. Much to the chagrin of Republicans, for all their clamoring about the Democrats not bowing to the will of the people, this bill inches us closer to a single-payer system than we ever have been before.
Pragmatically speaking, it seems to be a good idea to attempt to un-couple health insurance from employment. Currently, health insurance is only truly affordable to those who are full-time employees of a company large enough to enroll its employees in a group plan with a major insurer. This bill creates an alternative marketplace, though it remains to be seen if premiums continue to escalate as fast as they have, or whether affordability improves. It seems that the subsidies and new restrictions on premium increases might thwart skyrocketing insurance costs, but we don't know for sure yet.
I've heard people say this bill simply codifies our dependence on insurance companies. I've heard others say that this bill will destroy insurance companies and force us towards a single-payer, government-run system. The truth of the matter is, nobody really knows what will happen in the long term. We do know the government will spend more money, but we also know that this bill will reduce uninsured visits to hospital emergency rooms.
Let's say the country ends up spending more money than before on health care as a result of this bill, and we have to pay for it out of our taxes. Would this be the end of the world? To libertarians who want to pay as few taxes as possible, it is. For less-radical conservatives, it is. For most of us, however, it shouldn't be. I can think of dozens of programs, both ongoing and finite, that cost this country tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Some of them are useful, but others we could live without. I can think of far worse ways to spend this kind of money than on extending health care benefits.
This is cold comfort to many who are happy with their current health insurance — yet most people's insurance won't change at all. My tax burden might increase a bit to help cover high-risk pools, but I can live with that. It is particularly cold comfort to the Libertarians, but the sad fact is that they are living in a fantasy world anyway. Our economic markets have never been free. Health care in this country was farther from a free market than just about any other market in the USA. The exchanges set up by this health care initiative will introduce more competition to the health insurance industry than it has ever seen before. Do these libertarians actually believe that we would roll back all the concessions granted to the special interests and the health care lobbyists over the past 50-odd years? Such an upheaval would have required an even more radical political shift than this health care bill represents. It's nonsense.
Thus, America was left with the following choice: more government involvement to try to fix the glaring problems in the health care industry, or the status quo — which most people generally despise once they become seriously ill. If the health insurance industry dies, few will mourn its passing. Putting aside catastrophic incident care, there's no compelling reason for insurance companies to be involved in our regular health care in the first place.
Truth be told, this reform initiative isn't very radically-liberal at all. In fact, Bob Dole proposed something similar in the 90s (which Mitt Romney helped re-create in his home state of Massachusetts while he was governor). In fact, probably the biggest reasons the public hates it is that it doesn't go far enough to create that single-payer system they want. That's where many Republicans are mistaken in believing that opposing this bill and offering less-radical alternatives was enough to claim political and moral superiority on this issue: if the Democrats' plan didn't go far enough for the people, their plan went even less far. And in spurning any attempt or opportunity to cooperate with the overall goal of the bill, Republicans suffered a huge loss — which this editorial sums up nicely.
We only have two additional points to mention. To our uber-liberal readers: the Stupak executive order doesn't fundamentally change anything about the bill or current law. If you thought Obama would usher in an era where the government would help pay for abortions, I want some of what you were smoking. To conservative readers who are angry about the rule, I will say the same thing I said to my liberal friends back in 2004, when W won his second term: get over it. If you're so unhappy that you want to leave the country, you know where the door is.