One test for President elect Trump will be if he can move the country from our can't do to a can do philosophy for the issues Americans have been coping with under President Obama. Relying and overestimating his ability to talk people into seeing things his way, President Obama pursued his own agenda and legacy relying on, as his pal, Jonathan Gruber so frankly stated, the stupidity of the American voter.
It was the sheer hopelessness and negativity we were told to deal with even as our government laid out first class treatment and the best that government can offer for public employees, illegal immigrants, international indulgence with unreliable partners, and policies that created a frighteningly increasing gap between rich and poor in this country. There was no relief as the lone-wolf President Obama kept lecturing on us how he knew better than anyone who differed with him and nowhere was this more true than with Obamacare.
Optimism to solve the healthcare crisis and repealing Obamacare should be based on two facts: Health insurance has manipulated itself into a product that is less insurance, capable of handling the unexpected financial and physical demands of needed medical services and more an education/prevention model and second, health insurance products offered to Americans instead of relying on the "minimum standards," adopted by the negative President should focus on what he sold us when he was elected--a plan like HIS FAMILY has access to as a public employee.
These are EASY changes because they were artificially embraced by governments and companies to begin with. First, make a federally designed program apply to public employees without exception or exemption based on the loophole of claiming that the federal government is the employer that can choose to offer superior benefits to its employees since WE PAY for those benefits. That's first and critical--Do you think Obamacare would be as bad as it was if instead of establishing minimum standards for health plans Obama had lived up to his promise of making sure we had access to plans like his family AND at the savings his family gets of $2,500 or more a year because public employees get up to 72 percent of their premiums paid for by their employer (you know our tax dollars)? Likely not.
As far as insurance companies, repealing Obamacare and the individual mandate is critical so that consumers regain their strongest power, vote with your dollars and your feet. Instead of being forced to purchase a consumer financial product, make those selling those products work for consumers. And for thinking consumers, the baseline requirement is sufficient coverage, options, and out of pocket limits to cover what we're charged for illness, not the low-hanging fruit at a higher price of selling the finite costs of checkups. This is the same problem that contributed to the original "uninsured" population, the population that opted out of health insurance coverage because in the event of needed medical services and care the product was INADEQUATE.
What supports optimism? Well, we'll go to the words of Janis Joplin: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Obamacare is a race to the bottom health insurance scheme designed to preserve the salaries of providers, the income of insurance companies and reduce what the federal government pays out on behalf of insureds using government programs. You'll notice who's left out of the benefits--consumers.
The only reason the government cared about enrollment even as it threw consumers under the bus? Because that was its deal with insurance companies as Obama gave into insurance lobby demands presented in: "Health Plans Propose Guaranteed Coverage for Pre-Existing Conditions and Individual Coverage Mandate,” produced by AHIP, 2008."
And, Obamacare hasn't worked. Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US. US life expectancy has dropped for the first time in decades. Even those fluidly "calculated" enrollment numbers were never accurate as revealed in May 2, 2016, Kimberly Leonard, US News, "Millions of Poor Still Could Have Gotten Coverage Without Obamacare," "Millions of poor Americans have signed up for no-cost health insurance that they could have gotten even without the passage of Obamacare." And all the pay 'em for preventions stuff has just led to exposing Americans to an onslaught of testing, "Your Doctor Likely Orders More Tests Than You Actually Need," Alice park, 3/24/2015, "…study after study shows that all of this testing isn’t actually leading to better care," TIME.COM.
The President impotently kept repeating his false mantras of Obamacare as "group health insurance," which it's not, of Obamacare as guaranteeing health care, which it does not, and as the US having a right to healthcare, which it does not all thanks to him, idiotically giving up on fixing the law in favor of self-stroking his own ego and bragging that Obamacare is here to stay.
So embrace optimism--Repeal Obamacare, make sure Paul Ryan's plan applies to Paul Ryan and other public employees first without exception and incentivize insurance companies to improve their product by giving people the right to choose their plans. That's the beginning and optimism and it starts with eradicating the can't do philosophy of the Obama years.
