It’s Alive! Obamacare: the Frankenstein Monster with a Heart
Chief Justice John Roberts, the genial archconservative who flubbed President Obama’s Oath of Office and declared that corporations are “people,” surprised nearly everyone yesterday by tipping the scales in favor of Obamacare. His deciding vote saved the Affordable Care Act from a premature burial by the Supreme Court. In the long run, his decision could save millions of Americans from the same fate.
Roberts deserves our respect and sympathy for voting like a human being instead of a partisan. It takes a brave and almost foolhardy conservative to break ranks with the faithful and face the inevitable wrath of the Tea Party. Already the hardcore GOP politicians, pundits and henchpersons have lit their torches and roused the village mob; eminent voices on the right have declared him a traitor and a coward. Some even suggested that his epilepsy medication has impaired his judgment.
At least Roberts can sleep with an undisturbed conscience, even as the bellowing of the mob drifts through his bedroom window. But what kind of creature has he saved from destruction? Does anyone really understand the strange, ungainly beast known as Obamacare?
To any objective observer (me included), the Affordable Care Act would appear to be a raging bundle of contradictions, a Frankenstein monster cobbled together from a disjointed assortment of body parts. Let me explain…
Obamacare takes the drastic step of forcing Americans to be insured or pay a penalty. Note that it doesn’t force us to buy insurance; the vast majority of Americans will continue to be insured by their employers. But the act would compel everyone to participate — even Rush Limbaugh, who boasts that he pays his own medical expenses without the aid of insurance (easy enough when your annual income is north of $30 million a year).
Conservatives regard this individual mandate as a violation of personal freedom. But so is the draft. So, for that matter, is the government ban on the slave trade. Anyone who agrees to participate in a society governed by laws naturally forfeits some degree of liberty.
Obamacare forces us to patronize private insurance companies. Conservatives who defame Obama as a socialist should take a closer look at this provision: the president is mandating that we acquire our insurance from the private sector. No state-run single-payer system… no government boards determining who qualifies for medical treatment and who doesn’t… no death panels telling Grandma she’s lived long enough.
No, the Affordable Care Act steers us directly into the open arms of corporate America, automatically ensuring that insurers do a brisk business collecting premiums from individuals and businesses alike. For a free-market capitalist, what’s not to like? Maybe this…
Obamacare forces insurers to cover everyone. That includes the obese, the drug-addled, the cancer-riddled, the unfit and the atherosclerotic. People with pre-existing conditions can no longer be turned away as bad risks. Obamacare essentially orders the insurance companies to embrace those risks, which strikes even an anti-corporatist curmudgeon like me as a little coercive.
At the same time, it always struck me as a wanton injustice that the people who need health insurance most desperately can’t get it… that they have to live in fear of catastrophic illnesses (and their subsequent treatments) that nobody of ordinary means can afford… that they face financial ruin if their health starts to implode (and, in fact, two-thirds of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are currently caused by medical issues).
Should health insurance even be in the hands of the private sector? Should it be controlled by companies that need to make a profit, when the people most inclined to use it would wreck their beautiful bottom line? The current system makes almost no sense, but it’s so deeply entrenched — and the opposition to government-administered healthcare is so obstinate in the U.S. — that any radical realignment would probably spark a Tea Party insurrection or worse.
Obamacare, that much-maligned creature of unappealing and seemingly mismatched parts, somehow manages to tread this landscape with surprising delicacy. It preserves the private-sector control of health insurance while it strings a broad safety net across the chasm to save lives and personal finances. Yes, it’s strange and awkward and will take some getting used to, but this Frankenstein monster clearly has a heart. And for now at least, thanks to the wisdom of Chief Justice Roberts, it’s alive.
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I feel no great debt to Justice Roberts. I’m glad for this latest ruling, but it is far from the universal, conscience driven HCR this country should have embraced long ago. As for incurring the wrath of the Tea Party, why should that be considered courageous? Not caving to the irrational and the sociopathic should be a natural reflex. In any case, the Citizens United decision is the Robert’s Court legacy that trumps all other decisions.
I would have liked to have seen Congress begin with health care for all children. They could have then extended that (after working out the bugs) to those up to twenty-six years of age. After all that, they then could have extended it to everyone else.
1. Only the hardest of hearts would deny children health care. Thus, if all children were covered there would be no bias and thus no reason to oppose it.
2. There will be bugs in the system. Medicare has the unusually huge bug (unfixed) of requiring payment within thirty days when investigating a new provider takes at least ninety days.
3. Those who had been on the government-sponsored (or controlled, or whatever it would be called) system would be the “new” voters who would be getting the new health care system extended to them. They would more likely be comfortable with it, since it would have been what they had always been using.
Rcoutme..Medicare does not pay until the provider has a provider number. The provider number has to be present in the transaction sent to the intermediary before payment is processed. The provider numbers are not issued until all paperwork is completed and the providers are approved for payment.
” Only the hardest of hearts would deny children health care.”
In that case our country is overrun with hard hearts, many who have managed to convince themselves their sociopathy is more akin to tough love. Crazy times.
zephyr: I think the ideal solution would have been to provide government-sponsored insurance (at a cost) to the uninsurable, rather than force insurance companies to cover high-risk customers.
Which would the conservatives hate more, I wonder: expanding the government’s role in providing insurance, or commanding private-sector insurers to pay for people with pre-existing conditions?
I have to differ with you on the courage of John Roberts: it takes extraordinary guts these days to vote with your conscience and buck your own faction (and everyone in government belongs to a faction now). Sad commentary on our times, I know.
Rick, as I was reading your column, I remembered the movie Young Frankenstein where Marty Feldman, all hunched over, with a small cane says to Dr. Frankenstein: “walk this way”. To me that is where we are now.
Oh, BTW, I liked your post.
In asking if healthcare should be in private sector, the article asks
When given the question of whether I want the government or companies to run my health care, the answer I give is “neither”. The fact is that _I_ want make my health care decisions. However, that seems to be something that too few in either party want. About the only person who ever spoke to this was a representative of small business on a panel on CSPAN.