As Frank Newport reported for Gallup.com for the period April 1st through 4th, 2015, the latest update, based on interviewing conducted April 1-4, “Americans Slightly More Positive Toward Affordable Care Act,” “…shows that Americans have returned to the more positive evaluation of a year and a half ago -- albeit one that remains net negative.”
Surprisingly to me, Mr. Newport reports that “The majority of Americans continue to say the law has had no effect on their healthcare so far,” but it certainly helps explain the fading “crisis” status of our healthcare system and the lowered urgency status from crisis to just another chronic problem for America.
Whatever Obamacare promised for American voters, it was clear in 2013 as the rollout of its more difficult consumer provisions hit homes all over the country that Obamacare created its own crisis, the new crisis of having an individual mandate, the new crisis of people being shut out of policies they could formerly afford, the new non-availability of policies they once afforded, the new corporate integration of the cost-saving measures off the backs of the sick and those who paid for health insurance coverage that covered less for more money.
The President, after making the sale to the American people did little in terms of behaving like a conscientious salesman and account executive, largely silent on the shock, the crisis into which he’d plunged an unsuspecting American people, only capable of reciting the stale pitch he’d used in the first place to justify the fact that we were stuck with Obamacare amidst a range of complaints that for the most part boiled down to that we didn’t know how it would work.
Consumers were already behind the curve as hospitals and other providers, and government, and insurance companies, the other stakeholders worked on working Obamacare to their own advantage while consumers allowed the years to move forward from 2010 to 2013 largely nonreactive to what was around the corner…Obamacare.
Obamacare has become a series of unfortunate flare-ups within the problem of US healthcare. Even the Supreme Court Case of King v. Burwell, will mean little regardless of its outcome because, well, Obamacare is simply part of the problem. Most of its worst features await Americans’ personal experience, and like everything the President supports, puts off the crisis until after the proposition has been somewhat accepted.
The President eases us into his betrayals, staggering effective dates, using secrecy or indefiniteness or outright lies to preface the introduction of the actual THING he’s doing, doing it gradually and frequently post election season, or restating the issue that for him is the one that needs solving as he did with Obamacare, indicating that “having health insurance” would solve the problem of health care regardless of how bad that health insurance coverage is and how much it would cost consumers to pay for it.
For me, Obamacare is not a crisis now in April 2015, but has matured into part of the problem in the US healthcare system which is significant because there is no urgency to repeal Obamacare, it’s simply another thing that consumers, especially those facing a health crisis must cope with and as such it is no surprise that the unpopular law is being tolerated by American citizens.
It is the distinction between the sense of crisis and that of a problem that politicians fail to recognize where a crisis will often require immediate action and a problem often allows for more reasoned assessment.
While the President’s self-assigned role of lone wolf encourages him to elevate everything he intends to do to a crisis frequently in order to bypass or push the limits of his own quest for power, others should be addressing whether there is a crisis in the first place in order to support our system of balanced government which requires time to achieve effective policies that reflect the goals of the people who are supposedly represented by elected officials.
Repeal Obamacare? Not necessary since it’s only part of the problem.
But there is a problem from the financial and physical devastation that inadequate health insurance policies pose to future potential patients to the systemic changes that reward cost-cutting by stakeholders (through incentives).
Our healthcare system has made the “patient” the problem and therefore the only target of significant healthcare cost-cutting reform. We’ve lost all sight of the unreasonableness of the prices charged for healthcare services to the prices charged for health insurance to the wasted money lost by institutional and provider fraud that is passed onto consumers, to the thousands of new workers “needed” to be hired by government to “administer” Obamacare.
Instead we’ve bought into the Obamacare “philosophy” that has as its undercurrent that if you’re well and therefore cost nothing in healthcare services you’re good but if you’re sick it’s your own fault for being fat, for being old, for making less than perfect lifestyle choices or even for having bad genetics or bad luck and therefore we will PUNISH you by charging you more in copayments, coinsurance, and deductibles for committing the sin of expecting something from the system you pay into and support.
Obamacare is not a crisis today, but it certainly reflects a crisis of attitude in America, the primitive impulse to prey on the weak and sick with the added twist of making others rich while we’re doing it.
