Time to jump into the way back machine to a couple of weeks ago on the forum, I
think. We can leave that pesky typo in the last health care thread title behind
and pick up this thread, hopefully without the interjections with obfuscation
of meaning from someone who arguably should be facilitating a logical and
informative discussion of health care.
I don’t think any of us ever thought that Romneycare, the PPACA (Patient
Protection Affordable Care Act), Obamacare or whatever else you care to call
it, was ever a good idea; it was just a Republican idea that was working in
Massachusetts that Democrats thought could make it through Congress to address
our health care problems and make the insurance industry happy. It was not a
good idea, but because Republicans lined up against it, a better version could
not replace it because the normal tweaking that happens in legislating could
not happen in our crippled government. If Democrats tried to get Republicans to
address the real problems in the ACA, it would be an existential crisis for the
bill and all of the improvements it brought even in its current flawed form.
Now, that crisis is upon us and it is all on Republicans, just as it was on
Democrats to do something about health care in President Obama’s first term, so
these folks need to obfuscate things as much as possible, hence the recent
contributions to the last thread on health care here.
Republicans want the market to take care of everything, but the market does not
do that without creating winners and losers, something antithetical to health
care, because effective health care concentrates on making everyone winners if
possible and minimizing and dealing with loss when winning is not possible. It
can be and really is a life and death numbers game where all you can do is make
those with the short end of the stick as comfortable as possible, but the sad
fact remains that outside of practical interventions, you only need health care
when you are ill or injured.
Insurance is a tool for minimizing the costs of one’s losses in life by pooling
those costs with others, and it is hardly the only tool available to us;
perhaps we could use it more effectively for health care if we regulated it
more strictly and completely controlled access to the insurance pool of
Americans, healthy or not, based on coverage for everyone as President-elect
Trump says he wants.
I still agree with George Dawson that the only acceptable replacement for the
ACA is single payer, but don’t see any way to get that in the next four years
unless President Trump adopts that view and Congress changes hands again, both
rather unlikely.