As we sit here in the middle of June we
are nearing a Supreme Court decision on The
Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act. Now for those of you who are not familiar with
the names of Constitutional Laws,
it is primarily known nationwide as “Obamacare”. The Court
will be weighing whether to uphold the
law which was signed by President Obama in March of
2010, overturn the law altogether, or
throw out the key provision within the law, The Individual
Mandate, which calls on everyone
to purchase private health insurance.
As both political parties setup their
respective talking points in anticipation of the verdict, and the
court prepares for the attacks from
diehard lefties and righties, The importance of the decision will
be felt not only in the upcoming
Presidential Election, but with individual citizens in this country
going
forward.
From a personal perspective The ACA is
kinda of like eating White Castle burgers when you have this
huge craving for steak. Any
Progressive worth his salt wants and desires a single-payer
health care system, but those liberals who think the
striking down of this law will pave the way for single-payer are not
realistic, not with this Republican House and if the dreaded
happens not this future Republican President.
GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney
has been vocal about the fact that he as The Commander and Chief
would repeal the ACA if the SCOTUS doesn't overturn it. Romney
repealing the law is like a parent disowning one of his children
because it was Romney, who as Governor of Massachusettes
implemented his own healthcare law with an individual mandate,
basically providing the President with a blueprint..
If President Romney follows through on
his promise he says he will replace the ACA with a plan that
basically does not guarantee mandates. The Obama Administration in
it's brief to the SCOTUS about the Constitutionality of the ACA said
that without mandates “premiums would increase significantly and
the availability of insurance would decline”. In short the working
poor, and the middle class who didn't have health insurance prior to
2010 will return to a world where it would be increasingly difficult
to acquire some under Mittens.
The fact that we find ourselves in a
position where a Supreme Court that is becoming more partisan by the
day (see Citizens United) is now going to decide the fate of the ACA
has to be laid at the feet of the Obama Administration. Don't get me
wrong there are a lot of Tea Party activists out there who
would have called Barack Obama a Kenyan, socialist, Marxists, even if
he had done away with every government job and called British
Prime Minister David Cameron for austerity tips, but the
messaging or lack thereof by the Administration until fairly recently
has been weak at best, and they wasted the opportunity to win over
true middle of the road moderates.
How many people out there who have no
political agenda whatsoever and are only interested in getting
themselves and their family quality healthcare know that the ACA will
provide financial assistance to people who have to buy insurance on
their own, expands Medicaid, and eliminates copays for some
preventitive services. Sure anyone can get lost in the weeds when it
comes to this stuff, but if your not out there selling the way the
President and his staff should have been and the fact that you put in
place measures that won't allow a lot of these things to kick in
until 2014, of course every right-wing think tank on
the planet is going come up flat out lies and negative connonatations
such as the name “Obamacare” itself.
As I say all of this I realize that it
may all be a moot point. The Supreme Court could go two of three
ways, strike down the law and force the President to start over
(without single-payer), or throw out the individual mandate, which in
a sense guts the law anyway. Given Justice Samuel Alito's response
to the President's feelings on the Citizens United decision
rendered by the court I'm not expecting this group to do the right
thing.
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