Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Brian Beutler at Salon explains how Conservatives — with no concern for making healthcare better — have made arguing about Obamacare a waste of time:
As always, though, the point of the complaints isn’t to address and
rectify problems, but rather to deploy them as subterfuge to wreck the
entire reform edifice.* * *
Conservatives only care about these problems insofar as they can be
used to trash or undermine the law in its entirety. That’s why they
never, ever mention any of the millions of people who will or are
already benefiting from the law. If they did, they’d have to entertain
solutions to these problems that don’t essentially kick a tent pole out
from underneath the system.The disruption we’re seeing in the
individual insurance market is mostly by design. And it’s mostly a good
thing. Until October, the individual market existed to sell insurance to
people who needed it least. Rates were low for healthy people precisely
because their old, sick neighbors were priced or locked out of the
system. They were also low because many of the policies on the market
didn’t actually fulfill the function of insurance, which is to hedge
against financial catastrophe.Obamacare eliminates each of these
enormous flaws by 1) regulating insurance so that it covers lots of
stuff and genuinely protects people from medical bankruptcy, 2) making
plans available and affordable to the ill and elderly by banning price
discrimination against sick people, and only allowing insurers to charge
the elderly three times as much as the young for equivalent coverage,
3) providing subsidies to the poor and middle class to make coverage
affordable.* * *
[Conservatives'] tremendous outpouring of grief for young, middle-class people now comes couched in the false premise that the only available solution is
complete repeal. You could counter that by any moral standard the system
the Affordable Care Act creates is preferable to the one we had before[.]
The dog & pony shows that Tea-Publicans in Congress are holding this week into the problems with the "ObamaCare" rollout are to feign concern for people being able to sign up; it is a subterfuge for their real goal: to sabotage and to undermine the program at every turn to ensure it fails.
This is something new, alien, un-American and unacceptable. It is the exact opposite of how American government works, and the exact opposite of what Democrats who opposed George W. Bush's Medicare Part D government subsidy to Big Pharma did just a few short years ago when that program experienced similar rollout problems.
It is all too phony and hypocritical for some Democrats to bear. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) expressed his frustration and anger on Tuesday. Democratic Congressman Blows Up At GOP During Obamacare Hearing: ‘Are You Really Serious?’:
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) slammed Republicans for failing to support
the Affordable Care Act once it became law, challenging them to go back
to their districts and tell their constituents that they’ll be taking
away their coverage.
“What are you going to do about the approximately 17 million children
with preexisting conditions who can no longer be denied health
insurance coverage,” Parscrell asked the GOP during a House hearing on
Obamacare. Standing up and pointing his finger at the other side of the
aisle, he continued, “We want to go back and want to say you are no
longer covered any longer — are you going to tell the parents of those
kids?”
Rep. Tim Griffin (R-AR) tried to answer that question, highlighting
GOP proposals to cover individuals with pre-existing condition. The
reply sparked even greater outrage from Parscrell:
GRIFFIN: You asked a question and I’m going to answer it. It’s a false
choice to say it’s Obamacare or nothing. There are numerous proposals
including one that I’m a co-sponsor of…PASCRELL: Are you serious what you just said? Are you really
serious? After what we’ve gone through and what we’ve gone through in
the last three and a half years? Have you — you can sit there
and say, that you had a legitimate alternative after these years? We’ve
gone through 44 votes, 48 votes now, of you trying to dismantle the
legislation. You call that cooperation? I don’t!
Watch it:
Though Republicans never rallied around a single Obamacare alternative, Griffin did announce his support for The American Health Care Reform Act five days ago. That bill would allow insurers to deny sick people coverage, but provide “federal support for state high risk pools to $25 billion over 10 years.”
It's been done, and doesn't work. "Obamacare had implemented a similar temporary program — the so-called
Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), which served as a bridge
for sick people who could not find individual coverage between 2010 and
2014 — but it ran out of money after too many sick people signed up for
coverage." "Without a mechanism that encourages younger and healthier individuals to
buy coverage and spread the risk and cost of insurance, programs
composed of very costly applicants are not sustainable."
UPDATE: MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes did an excellent segment on the GOP hypocrisy. "So if you think the rollout of a federal health insurance exchange for 7 million people is rough, remember, it is the official position of the Republican Party to add 50 million seniors" to a federal health insurance exchange under the Paul Ryan Plan. governor Deval Patrick (D-MA) is the interview.