One of my state’s U.S. Senators sent me an email the other day, after the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act. Among other things, the message said:
“Regardless of the legal decision handed down yesterday, the fact remains that Washington-run health care is bad for patients and bad for the economic and fiscal health of our country.”
There are several things that bothered me about the email. For starters, I don’t think that the law in question will have our government running the health care system of the United States. The law requires that everyone have health insurance. Medicaid may subsidize low-income people who cannot afford to purchase private insurance, but for the most part private sector health insurance companies are involved. Perhaps the gentleman in question doesn’t have a firm grasp on the laws of our land. Makes one wonder how he got his current job (you know…making laws).
I am a student of history. I love reading about the past, of how and why things were done. I firmly believe that there is a tremendous amount of information about the past that we can use to better shape our future. Here’s a favorite quote (it’s more than 100 years old):
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905
History tells us that health care reform in this country has been championed by Presidents that include Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. I’m fairly certain the men in question were Republicans, although I doubt that today’s party would elect either one (TR was a reformer, apparently a dirty word now, and Nixon gave us the EPA…who can afford clean water and air?) The idea for the current health care reform law was proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. A former state governor named Willard M. Romney used it as the basis for a health care reform law passed in his home state. As a candidate for U.S. President, this same man now wants to abolish the federal version of the law. I don’t believe a coherent explanation has ever been given for this discrepancy.
The law was designed to alleviate the inherent inefficiency of our current system, because, among other things, the uninsured people of this country are using the hospital emergency room as their primary care physician. This, and related factors, leads to an unnecessary increase in health care costs.
Here’s a crazy thought (I’m full of them, having grown up in the ‘60’s): The ACA was a law passed by Congress, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Why doesn’t everyone sit back, take a deep breath, and see if maybe the law works? If it doesn’t, we can always change it, or get rid of it, later.
Now there was something else in this email that bothered me (Why this dude even bothers writing me boggles my mind. Sure as heck I’m not sending him any money). The sender implied that instead of supporting this unpopular law (proposed by his own party’s respected conservative think tank and passed by a majority vote in Congress) the President should be focusing on creating jobs. Um…maybe he forgot that the President’s Job Bill has been languishing before Congress (you know, where he works), held up by the sender’s party, because…why? Are they afraid it might work to create jobs and get the guy reelected…and keep them out of power for a little longer?
After all, we (thankfully) elect a President and a Congress to run our republic. Our President isn’t an omnipotent ruler who can snap his fingers and get things done. We have checks and balances. He’s done what he could, and now is waiting for Congress to act. Too bad they’re acting like idiots, or as Santayana would say…infants.
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