A guy named William Duncan at a blog called Sensible Thoughts posted something I found inherently unsensible a while back. He listed six reasons why he thought the Affordable Care Act should be repealed. (“A while?” “Yeah, July 2012 is ‘a while.'”)
His sixth point was the old canard about Congress and the President being exempt. Of course they are not exempt, and so I told him.
Your sixth reason is in error. There is no provision to exempt either the president or Congress from the act. There is no language in the bill such as you describe. Language from page 114 can be found here:
https://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/obamacare-making-stuff-up-to-complain-about/
At some length, Mr. Duncan removed that point, but said he still thinks the law should be repealed on the other five points I hadn’t dealt with.
Ed:
Thank you for the correction on point #6. I have gone back and looked at this, and you are absolutely right. Although the Wall Street Journal and folks like Sean Hannity reported that the President and members of Congress are exempt from participation in the Affordable Care Act, in the end that did NOT make it into the language of the legislation. I have deleted point #6 from the post as a result. Thank you for the correction. Now, if you copuld only prove me wrong on the rest of the points listed…. Unfortunately, this remains a bill the the American public did not want, and was purchased by shenanigans that the Administration should be ashamed of.
A quick and dirty response; we may need to put more meat on these response bones in the next couple of months, because the opposition to ObamaCare relies on severely distorted claims about the law and what it actually does. Much if not most of the good stuff in the law is completely ignored by these critics, and we should point that out, too.
I responded (images added here):
Disproof?
What makes you think Americans didn’t want it? There was a whale of an anti-health care campaign after the act passed, but when it passed, it enjoyed a majority of support. And, when we take each provision of the bill and ask people about that provision, they approve overwhelmingly.
Depiction of the House vote on H.R. 3590 (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) on March 21, 2010, by congressional district. Democratic yea, dark blue; Democratic nay, light blue; Republican nay, red; No representative seated, white. Image from Wikipedia
For example, not even you are opposed to continuing the Reagan-era program that encourages medical schools to train more general practitioners. No one seriously objects to the provisions that pay physicians to practice in under-served areas, like West Texas, Iowa, and West Virginia. No one objects to the provisions that train more nurses. Only the most rabid racists complain about continuing and expanding the health care clinics on Indian reservations.
The law has dozens of provisions like those, and no one in their right mind objects to them.
Your other five points?
- The Supreme Court killed that one for you. They said that, even if you call it a fine, it’s a tax. And at that, it’s a helluva bargain. For those who do not purchase health insurance because they can’t afford to, they must pay $695 additional tax, per year. That’s about what I’d pay monthly on the open market.In any case, there are no fines, according to the Supreme Court.
Depiction of the Senate vote on H.R. 3590 (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) on December 24, 2009, by state. Color code is difficult to decipher; let it suffice that if there are two Democratic yea votes, the state is colored deep blue; if two Republican nay votes, very red. Image from Wikipedia
But I can’t imagine why you oppose bargains in health care, especially when they lower the costs of health care to the insured, who will no longer pay the 15% to 25% premium to cover indigent care.
- With all the “new taxes,” CBO, the non-partisan group that scores these issues for Congress, projects the bill will decrease federal spending and cut the deficits annually, when fully enacted in 2014 and all out years.Do you oppose deficits or not?All the other taxes are fair, strike only the tippy-top income tiers, and are cheap at that.These taxes make the system more fair. It’s stacked against anyone making less than $150,000 a year, now. That’s most of us. I don’t like it when government helps the rich, at the expense of the poor — that’s contrary to moral standards my church holds, for example, and it tends to damage the economy.So I think more fair taxes, and lower costs, will be quite popular, once we see them.So, new taxes aren’t a good justification to oppose the law.
- Speaking of fallacious accounting — CBO, the group you cite, says the bill will reduce the deficits. You assume the Law won’t work, while small portions of it have already slashed inflation in health care costs, from 20% in 2009 to 4% in 2011 and 2012.But, what about repeal? CBO looked at that, too — repeal of the law will increase deficits, not decrease them. It’s only $109 billion increase in deficits, but these number directly refute all claims that repeal would be cheaper. See the analysis gateway here: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43471
- This Medicare issue was hashed out, accurately and well I thought, in the campaign. Medicare costs will be reduced by holding costs down — benefits will not be reduced. Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan ran into some difficulty with this, because their budget plans assumed the savings from the Affordable Care Act, while eliminating the law that produced the savings.I’m sure there will be some adjustments required. Medicare seems a little ham-fisted when it comes to dealing with local and regional cost differences, but nationwide, over the past 40 years, enormous savings have been realized by reducing some reimbursements for procedures that once were uncommon and expensive, to a less expensive rate, now that they are more common. On the whole, over 40 years, over thousands of procedures, physicians have changed their expectations, and things have worked fine. Oh, there have been grumblings, I know. But the cuts in costs, without cuts in benefits, have stuck.Under the Affordable Care Act, we hope a lot more people will move to company plans from Medicare, or at least to the exchange plans offered in each state.One of the changes already introduced is working [link added here]. Rather than pay providers for each procedure, Medicare now reimburses hospitals for effective hospitalization — that is, when a patient is discharged and then re-enters a hospital for the same complaint, the hospital will lose money. Hospitals are keeping patients a few days longer on many procedures, to insure that one hospitalization is all that is required. Savings are already being made in costs, while improvements have resulted in the health care – better health in the patients!In all, CBO says costs will come down with the Affordable Care Act, as advertised, and costs will rise and deficits will rise if the Act is repealed.
- Your abortion argument is too metaphysical, and not enough real-world. Do you want to reduce the number of abortions? Then provide health care, make sure contraception is freely available (not for free, but freely), and stand back. Those two things reduce abortions, as they did during the Clinton administration.Restrictions on abortion, on the other hand, make it more likely a woman will choose to terminate a pregnancy under a number of circumstances: She doesn’t have health care coverage, her coverage does not cover pre-natal care, her coverage won’t cover a new infant, the pregnancy is unplanned due to lack of good information on family planning or lack of access to affordable contraception.You can choose: Restrict abortions and increase the number of abortions, or provide health care, and reduce the number of abortions.It may be a bit counter-intuitive, but you’d better study the issue. The Affordable Care Act’s provisions, Obamacare, have over the years reduced abortions where applied; cutting off that care has increased the number of abortions.My advice would be, don’t kill the babies to make a political point.
I am concerned that you don’t appear much familiar with what the bill actually does. Here are a few reasons to keep the law.
- We need more physicians, and the bill provides them.
- We need more physicians in underserved areas, and the bill provides them.
- We need more nurses, and the bill provides them.
- We need more community clinics in underserved urban areas [link added here], where illnesses and injuries frequently go untreated until extreme trauma results, and the victim must get extremely expensive care in an emergency room. This will be one of the biggest cost savers — and the law provides those clinics.
- The law will cut the private bureaucracy, and completely dismantle the private death panels set up by insurance companies, saving at least 10% of every health care dollar, applying that money to care instead of bureaucracy. This is already occurring.
- Preventive care under the Act is greatly encouraged — if we can boost flu vaccines by another 10%, it will save thousands of lives annually, and millions of dollars in hospitalization costs. Flu shots came with no co-pay this year — did you notice? — so that anyone with any insurance at all could drop by any pharmacy offering flu shots and get one with no out-of-pocket expenses.
This is huge. Everyone agrees the cheapest health care is for healthy people. The Affordable Care Act changes the way health care is delivered, to emphasize prevention of disease and injury, instead of triage. Prevention usually costs about 10% what the triage would cost.- Removing the lifetime cap on insurance payments, per patient, will save a few thousands of lives, annually. It should kill the phenomenon where many families, hit with a costly disease or accident, had to declare bankruptcy as a result. A significant portion of all bankruptcies have been “not adequately-insured” cases. Those should almost disappear.
- Allowing children to stay insured, on a parent’s plan, for those critical years after high school and college and into the second job, with benefits has already benefited millions of Americans, saving millions of dollars and probably a few lives.
I cannot imagine why anyone would want to go back to 20% annual health care cost inflation, the highest per capita health care costs in the world by a factor of two, while leaving one out of every seven people uninsured even though we were paying amounts more than the insurance would have cost.
Obamacare reduces the deficits, and puts our health system on the path to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world, with better care for less cost.
I’ll keep it, thank you.
(See this, too: “More good news about Obamacare: CBO says it will save money”
More:
- The case for deficit optimism (washingtonpost.com)
- Affordable Care Act Great for Seniors (medicaresupplementshop.com)
- Michele Bachmann Obamacare Repeal Gets ZERO Co-Sponsors (addictinginfo.org)
- Unaffordable Cost Seen for Some Under Affordable Care Act (bloomberg.com)
- Estimates for the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act Updated for the Recent Supreme Court Decision (Congressional Budget Office)
- IRS public memorandum on changes in tax law for the Affordable Care Act, updated December 2012
- WonkBlog at the Washington Post discussed who gets covered, and who doesn’t and what they pay, in July 2012
- Blue Cross/Blue Shield fact sheet on the Affordable Care Act and its provisions
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
[…] 2. Obamacare: Still the better way, still saving money, still a good deal […]
LikeLike