Obama: Face it, Obamacare's a little political
This article was originally published in Clinica
Even though the US was teetering on the brink of a potential second Great Depression in January 2009, President Barack Obama said he recognized when he entered the White House he needed to also tackle some of the structural problems that had been building up for years, with healthcare "one of the biggest," and whose overhaul could not wait until the economic crisis was over.
"Healthcare is the economy," or at least, "a massive part" of it, President Obama declared on 24 September. "The idea that somehow we can separate out the two is a fallacy," Mr Obama argued during an early evening discussion at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York, where he shared the stage with former President Bill Clinton.
The "hugely inefficient, wildly expensive" US healthcare system, the president said, is "what accounts for our deficit. It's what accounts for our debt," and is a "huge burden on our businesses."
"So this has everything to do with the economy," President Obama contended, explaining why he pursued getting the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted, despite being urged to wait a year or two.
"I think this is a big step forward for America," President Clinton said about the ACA, insisting the law, over the next decade, will "not only make us healthier, but it will free up the private sector large funds that can then be reinvested in other areas of economic growth and give us a much more well-balanced economy."
Bringing healthcare coverage to uninsured Americans should have been pretty straightforward, President Obama noted. "But let's face it, it's been a little political, this whole Obamacare thing," the president acknowledged.
And what's occurred – especially in recent months as the 1 October enrollment period begins for the ACA online insurance markets – has been an "unprecedented effort" in which opponents of the law have fought "tooth and nail" to try to "scare and discourage people from getting a good deal," President Obama said, calling some of the anti-Obamacare television commercials a "little whacky."
"There has been billions of dollars spent making people scared and worried" over the changes in healthcare coming because of the ACA, he said, explaining that people generally are more comfortable with the devil they know rather than the one they don't.
While the two presidents were on stage in New York, back in Washington, Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) was speaking at length on the Senate floor against the ACA in an attempt to hold up the Democrats' plans of stripping a measure to defund Obamacare from a short-term spending bill passed on 20 September by the House.
If the House and Senate do not have a spending bill for President Obama by 1 October, the US government, for the most part, will shut down (www.clinica.co.uk, 16 September 2013) – a risk Mr Cruz said he is willing to take, although others in his party have objected to that tactic.
But President Obama said what's really behind the effort to stop the ACA from being implemented is the fear that "once consumers get hooked on having health insurance and subsidies, then they won't want to give it up" – something he said a "major" opponent of the law recently "fessed up" to.
"It is an odd logic," Mr Obama said. "Essentially they're saying people will like this thing too much and then it will be really hard to roll it back."
The president said he has been "sympathetic" to some of the Republican governors, who are under a lot of pressure to oppose Obamacare, which he said has "become a litmus test" for party loyalty. "For some of them, politically it's been tough," the president said.
Nonetheless, some Republican state chiefs – even those in some of the reddest conservative states, like Idaho and Kentucky – have decided to let their states run the ACA online insurance exchanges rather than leaving them to the federal government to operate.
"You're seeing some Republican governors step up and saying, 'I may not like Obamacare, but I'm going to go ahead and make sure that my people are benefiting from this plan.' So that's one good thing that's happening," President Obama said.
Even though the mandates for "small" penalties that will be imposed on Americans at certain income levels who fail to purchase healthcare insurance by 1 January 2014 or large employers that do not offer coverage to their workers by the following year have been controversial and unpopular, it was necessary because "as a society, what we cannot do is to say, 'you have no responsibilities whatsoever, but you've got guaranteed coverage'" by seeking care at hospital emergency rooms, where the costs are dumped on society. "That's not fair," President Obama declared.
The bottom line, he said, is "do we want to continue to live in a society where we've got the most inefficient healthcare system on Earth, leaving millions of people exposed to the possibilities that they could lose everything because they get sick or we've got little children and families going to the emergency room once a week because they've got asthma and other preventable diseases."
"Is that the kind of society we aspire to? I think the answer is no," the president said.
“The notion that some would resist as fiercely as they have, make this their number-one agenda perpetuating a system in which millions of people across the country, hardworking Americans, don't have access to health care, I think is wrong," President Obama said.