Break out that champagne, folks, and lift your glasses of bubbly to Chief Justice John Roberts and the U.S. Supreme Court.
For the second time in three years, the court last week on a vote of 6-3 upheld a crucial provision of the Affordable Care Act, dubbed ObamaCare, and making it finally, indisputably, the law of the land.
President Obama’s signature health-care plan has been vindicated legally. It’s here to stay.
Now, perhaps the Republicans in the U.S. Congress can quit wasting their time – and our tax money – by trying to repeal the law or trying to kill it through death by a thousand cuts. ObamaCare, the so-called Monster from the Deep, is nothing of the sort. It’s been vilified as a job-killer. It’s not; jobs have been rebounding dramatically. It’s been said it’s a budget-buster. It’s not; the deficit is still declining. Just recently, the Congressional Budget Office released an in-depth study that said repealing ObamaCare would increase – not decrease – the federal deficit by $109 billion through the year 2022. Critics said the ACA would increase medical costs astronomically. It didn’t; those costs have shown the least increase in the last half century. We’ve heard repeatedly the law is a government take-over. It’s not; private insurance companies are the insurers, not the government.
Predictably, right-wingers decried the Supreme Court’s decision, calling Chief Justice Roberts a turncoat because ObamaCare haters thought they had him “in their pocket.” They also chided the conservative-leaning Justice Anthony Kennedy for siding with the court’s majority decision.
The gnat chasers will continue their frantic pursuit to find any and every little thing wrong with the law so that baby can be thrown out with bath water.
House Majority Leader John Boehner vowed repeal efforts will continue so Americans can be “put back in charge of their own health care.” Somewhere along the line, Old Boehner missed the point. The reason there was a need for the ACA or something like it was precisely because Americans were not in charge of their own health care. Escalating costs were pricing millions and more millions of hard-working Americans right out of the market. You certainly are not in charge of your own health care when you can’t afford to get any.
All five-years-worth of their carping and train-wreck predictions might have credence if they had any health-care proposals of their own. But they don’t. Their only proposal (besides their usual lame health-care tax credits and health-care savings accounts) is to trash ObamaCare and go back to the way things were before, to the good old days when millions of hard-working (but poor) Americans were without any kind of health insurance and couldn’t afford to get any.
Someday, these ACA critics, their kids or grandkids might be in a tight-income dilemma or flat-out broke, at which time, they will be mighty glad and grateful there is a system in place (ObamaCare or a variant of it) that makes it possible for them to buy affordable insurance coverage.
As has been pointed out by political commentators, many grandstanding opponents of the ACA are crying crocodile tears about the court’s decision. They are secretly glad the law was upheld because if it hadn’t been, if six million or more people suddenly lost their insurance overnight, ACA-haters would have to come up with their own plan or some way to help those people. That would have been a political liability for them, especially since they have no fix-it plan and never have had one.
Is ObamaCare perfect? Of course not. What is these days? But what is most important is the law is a framework for improvements when there was no such framework before. For decades, the numbers of uninsured kept growing, and people kept dying needlessly.
So far, 16 million people have signed up for private insurance via ObamaCare. Success stories abound about how people’s lives have been saved because check-ups they’d had caught early cancers and other medical problems that could be dealt with in time. Thanks to the ACA, people are living, not dying. Why do detractors insist on calling that outcome a “train wreck?”
In a speech after the court’s decision, President Obama said it best, calling it a victory for hard-working Americans.
“As the dust has settled, there can be no doubt this law is working. It has changed and, in some cases, saved American lives . . . This is not an abstract thing anymore. This is not a set of political talking points. This is reality.”
Three cheers for President Obama. Three cheers for ObamaCare.