AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE

AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE
©2013 Mitchell Jon MacKay
ACA, AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, as Obamacare is officially known, is not known by the proletariat or bourgeoisie alike as ACA despite the dislike of it by those who do not know that ACA refers to Obamacare. In other words they know not what they condemn or why.
We’ve received little information thus far other than sketched in prognoses and declamations. One argument pro ACA states that small businesses will be aided by health care partially funded by government whereas the opposite has been a mainstay of Republican opposition, namely that it will put small businesses out of business. Who’s right?
Since there are no statistics to tell we can only go with the prognoses that point out definitions of potential worth, there so far being zero justifications of supposed worthlessness or actual harm. The only extrapolation to be conjured for legislative protest against Obamacare is that those who do so are on the dole from large insurance companies. Insurance companies are known to contribute heavily to election campaigns, which has kept them mostly free from regulation. It is well known that one stipulation of the ACA is that preexistent health conditions cannot be cause for refusal of insurance or for rate hikes.
Naturally insurance companies do not like these clauses. The impetus for forming health insurance companies may have had some altruistic benevolence but it is a profitable business. Even Blue Cross Blue Shield which is supposedly a non-profit makes money and lots of it. Their rate hikes are government controlled but they always manage to make out alright. Go figure.
With the lack of any reputable information against this Act one can only presume that it is financially based. Republicans, those who found the means to force a government shutdown, claim only that this plan will hurt the average American worker and business owner. But companies with less than fifty employees – the vast majority, 96% – are exempt from the mandate of offering insurance or paying a hefty fee fine for not doing so. Mega companies already offer health care insurance. Do those Republicans really care about small business or the average American? That seems unlikely gauging by the obstreperous manner in which they attack the system of government. They claim that small government is desirable yet they are principle components of big government, voting their own rates of pay on taxpayers’ dollars.
Without knowing with even vague factual cognizance what is to come of this, Americans can only wait and see. What we see and hear to the contrary has no basis in fact, only wild rumor without substance, “death panels” and the like. Despite the workingman’s stubborn adherence to the attacks on Obamacare, he knows not the actual design of it or how it may evolve. Is this then simply prejudice? It seems possible. Or to phrase it with aplomb, this may be ultracrepidarian, i.e. spouting ad hominem (non-sequitur) information beyond one’s knowledge, contempt of something not understood, attacking the fellow in lieu of the argument details. Essentially it just comes off as pusillanimity, mean-spirited timidity and pettiness.
The naysayers are not above disassembling the country’s infrastructure to have their way, the only power they possess which harms them not an iota but infects the public at large, those for whom they portend to represent. Not even the term oxymoronic suffices to address this; it’s rather adolescent intransigence. But it must have a financial base since simple political strategy doesn’t hold water when there’s no rationale, a sieve of contumacy without factual backup. It has to come down to money, campaign dollars quid pro quo for pro-business votes, those “investment opportunities” available to legislators likely figuring into it as well – all those interactions benefitting the various parties in so many ways. The “good life” does tend to attract them, hedonism @ cost of taxpayers abetted by insider trading.
At any rate, the law is being enacted; it is only a protest commandeered by a majority of House Republicans that confuses the issue, even labeled an Obama shutdown by these ones as if Obama himself had shut the government down. Therein is an epitome of audacity in reversing the blame by the blamer who caused the false accusation, an absolute inversion of logic and certainly an absence of decency. Further, they have the audacity of claiming it is for the average American they protest when it is obvious that this is who they attack.
Irrational illogic indicates either a mental disorder or some ulterior motive. Perhaps both. Humanitarian principles do not usually enter the political realm unless after the fact as prejudicial histories are written but humane rhetoric is used nonetheless even as backs are stabbed and reputations muddied.
Obama has his share of incongruities and failures, it is true – ask any voter. National health care has been bandied about for decades for the US but Obama’s somehow took root and actually was voted into law. Maybe that was due to several factors, the first black president, the Nobel Peace Prize, his proclamations prior to office that didn’t materialize in office, the mood of the country weary of war and terrorism, lockdown surveillance, the sense of enough is enough. Whatever, the idea of universal health care is embraced by many Americans though confusion reigns. Polls find that Affordable Care Act respondents outnumber Obamacare in praise and derision when they are one and the same Act as per the foregoing. Clearly many people want affordable health care but don’t want Obama. To simply not want affordable health care is preposterous. That would be construed as burning down one’s house to spite the neighbors, especially when applied to the resentful members of the legislature who irresponsibly muck the system with juvenile pouting redoubt.
Probably there will come some inefficiencies and negatives with the unfolding of this Act because there always are. It’s only a beginning, the beginning of socialized medicine in whatever way it congeals, seemingly akin to the Canadian or Western European systems. To reiterate, if legislators don’t want big government, they’re free to leave. That will be Obama’s major legacy if it sticks, not the bailout stimulus, the unrequited promises, the Nobel Prize, the first black, the pros and cons, the poise of oratory. America joins the free world in caring for those who cannot afford to care for themselves.
Curiously or not, the number of Americans receiving food assistance – some 47 million – equates closely with the number of medically uninsured. This surely indicates a turn toward Socialism albeit a conflated Socialism/Capitalism model much as China is Communism morphing toward Capitalism. Universal care is the essence in any case, a humanitarian precept to be sure whereas also a financial insight via preventative maintenance. A balanced diet and regular checkups save money via healthier lifestyle which avoids the Emergency Room and inability to work. Though this is condemned by the worker who is insured, it balances out in the overall assessment of predictable and dependable care. This is what the Affordable Care Act portends to do. Those who don’t want it are either ignorant or conspiratorial. If there is a third negative catalyst based on solid facts and insightful projections we have not heard it yet.
As to who caused the shutdown, it’s solely House Republican Representatives. How they can do this no one seems able to convey. It’s not in the Constitution. Some say it’s due to gerrymandering, others the debt ceiling whatever that may allude to. It’s unconscionable for a minority of lawmakers to have such ability to begin with. Perhaps a new Amendment, number XXVIII – Congress shall not countenance nor instigate politically-based shutdowns. Then they’d argue the meaning of “politically-based”, as in “What is, is?” “What you see is what you get.” Or don’t get.