Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Obamacare Will Be A Pretty Big Success

I think the extension of health insurance to all Americans is a huge step forward. It will soon become as much a part of the fabric of American life as Social Security and Medicare.  It will be hard to convince students in a few years that there was a time when we did not have universal health insurance.

It will also be hard to convince students, especially the Republican students, that Republican legislators all voted against universal health insurance.  That the Republican Party ran three elections on trying to defeat and then overturn what they called Obamacare.  The Tea Party is opposed to the Affordable Care Act beyond the point of reason sometimes.  They shut down the government and were ready to bankrupt the country rather than let the uninsured have health insurance.

The Republican alliance with the Tea Party will, I think, be seen as a disastrous miscalculation, especially about Obamacare.

The Republican Party is strenuously, even frantically, opposed to Obamacare because they know it will be a success.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I disagree. Obamacare will lead to a system in which upper management of large corporations has private health insurance coverage, while most workers will be forced to pay more out of pocket for insurance on the exchanges. Obamacare will not make health insurance affordable and will reinforce societal divisions between the haves and have-nots. The ultimate failure of Obamacare will mean that we either return our health insurance system to a free-market paradigm or toward a single-payer system.

margaret sanger said...

As a centrist I think pendulum is about to swing toward the right again.ACA will taint the ideology of nanny state for a while until the pendulum swings toward the left.

Anonymous said...

I see your blog it titled "Gruntled Center". Maybe a bit more realistic name is in order as one who is in favor of socialized medicine is hardly a centrist but is a leftist. So maybe "Gruntled Left" should be your more accurate name.

Tim Jessen said...

I agree completely! I wish Indiana's leadership would show the same guts as Ky. Gov. Beshear, who is trying to HELP the many poor and needy of my former state of residence get health care. Those who are committed to their own "agenda" like Indiana's Gov. Pence don't care about the poor, just embellishing their own "tea party" image. For shame!! They call "good evil, and evil good", just as the prophets warned us. And yours IS the Centrist view, as all sensible people should realize.

margaret sanger said...

Jinson, When you say your opponents don't want to help the poor and that sensible people agree with you, you lose credibility.

The Gallop Poll today states that only 22% of the uninsured plan on signing up for insurance.

Howard Dean on Morning Joe stated that the next big surprise will be the ballooning of the deficit due to subsides associated with the ACA.

Gruntled said...

Anonymous: Do you consider Medicare and Social Security to be socialist? Do you and your family use them?

Gruntled said...

Margaret Sanger: Today's Gallup Poll said that "Just 22 percent of uninsured Americans plan on getting health insurance through the government exchanges." That is, they are so frustrated with the federal website when they are trying to get insurance that they are starting to ask private insurers.

As Tim Jessen noted, in Kentucky, where the state set up its own health insurance exchange and actively helps people sign up, the new health insurance roll out has been going very well.

margaret sanger said...

I fear the gruntled centre and jimsom are whistling past the graveyard.

Pat Griffin said...

'Obamacare' is not 'socialized medicine.' Other than the part that involves expansion of Medicaid, it is not even socialized heath insurance. It is mostly socially subsidized and regulated private health insurance. And if anyone who favors 'socialized medicine' (especially defined that broadly) is a leftist, there are very few conservatives or even centrists anywhere else in the developed world.

margaret sanger said...

Pat, it is immoral to take something from one person at the barrel of a gun and give it to another person.

Call it what you like.

PJ said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
PJ said...

You are probably right ObamaCare will be a lasting monument, but I don't think you have the right reason. Many years ago, in my first political science studies, I learned an electoral truism. You get more votes promising to give a dollar to each person than you do promising to let ten people keep an extra dime of their pay. That is, a politician will find more votes by promising to expand government programs and transfers than by cutting them.

The transfer may only help one person in ten, but that one person will be so gratefully devoted to you that you can count on that vote for many elections to come. On the other hand, the tax cut may benefit ten people, but those people will not feel any sense of gratitude. After all, they reason, I earned that money; simply letting me keep it isn't doing me any kindness. The only time tax cuts are good electoral politics is when people are mad as hell, and that's a tough sentiment to sustain for more than a couple of election cycles.

That dynamic is, to my mind, a more likely explanation for why any government program (like ObamaCare), once established, is likely to continue in place indefinitely. It may be the public policy equivalent of the Edsel, but the people who benefit quickly become so devoted to it that pressing for a rollback is bad electoral politics.