Big Shiny Health Care Promises.
In Political World facts have become a lot like banana peels. Slippery if politicians aren’t careful about how they’re discarded. But mostly just things to be peeled away to get to the parts the political types find useful.
Words, however, still matter. In particular words that politicians have fashioned into promises. “If you like your health plan you can keep it,” President Obama once said while promoting his Affordable Care Act. The promise came back to haunt him. The law passed and a lot of substandard insurance plans disappeared like cockroaches scuttling under the furniture when a light is switched on. Millions of people needed to upgrade to higher quality plans. One could argue that was a good thing. But almost no one did. PolitiFact called it The Lie of the Year for 2013. The kerfuffle over Obama’s promise gave those trying to undo his Affordable Care Act a lot of room to run.
Those selfsame politicians have been laboring long and hard in the basement of the capital building to come up with a plan to replace Obamacare. And they’ve been making big promises of their own. I’m no expert in health care, but I know a thing or two about words. I can tell you that finding wiggle room in the promises we’ve been hearing isn’t going to be any easier for them than it was for President Obama.
So now House Republicans have presented us with a 123-page piece of legislation intended to replace the Affordable Care Act. The media will be lit up with experts arguing over what it does and does not accomplish, and we should pay attention. This really is a matter of life and death.
The good news for those of us watching from our armchairs at home is that we don’t need to understand all the nuances of health care reform. We only need to understand that we’ve been promised a system that will cover more people, with better care, for less money. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan put it most succinctly. “The freedom to buy what you want to fit what you need.”
Of course, none of us want to buy anything when it comes to an expensive health insurance plan. It’s not the sort of product that offers the immediate satisfaction of, say, a new snowboard or a shiny car out in the driveway. And we can’t really know what will fit what we need until that grim, hopefully far-off day when a doctor says, “The results are back from your tests, and you might want to sit down.”
That’s why health care is so complicated, and doesn’t fit neatly into the free market ideology that Republicans get so enthusiastic about. But that’s not our problem. The promises we’ve been made are as easy to understand as a slice of pie. That’s what to watch for as the debate heats up. And keep your eyes and your pitchforks sharp. Remember what I said about facts and the current crop of politicians.
If I were to make a crazy crystal ball prediction, it would be this. Something remotely recognizable as the plan put together by the House Republicans will pass. It will cause a fair amount of havoc in the insurance markets and misery for a lot of our fellow citizens, and two years from now the newly elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate will finally put together what should have been included in the original Affordable Care Act. A public option that takes care of the people that traditional insurance companies can’t figure out a profitable way to cover. The bill will be reluctantly signed by President Mike Pence.
But maybe there’s still a chance to get it right this time around, given the clarity of the promises that have been made. After all these years we’ve become practiced consumers of the health care debate. Members of Congress who tried to put on a town hall meeting in the past month learned that first hand. We’re being asked to accept a re-making of the way we get health care for the second time in a decade, replacing a system that isn’t perfect but has done a decent job of making health care available to the highest number of Americans ever. It shouldn’t be that hard to judge whether the new plan is fulfilling the promise of delivering even better care to more people for less money. So it’s time to hold some politicians’ feet to the fire. Let’s make sure that fire is hot and bright.
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