Susan Dench’s Nov. 21 OpEd reminds us once again of the smug cruelty being employed by political opponents of the Affordable Care Act. Along with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (and others at “Faux News”), Dench has seized on some Colorado group’s pro-ACA ad that highlights birth control coverage. She uses this to attack first-time health care for millions of people who cannot get insurance under our current system.
The Republicans have no answers for the people who can’t afford coverage under today’s profit-driven system of outrageous rates, junk policies, claims caps and denials of coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. Up until the implementation of Obamacare, this country had the worst system of health care coverage in the industrialized world. This is the mess that really matters — and not all the hypocritical noise being made about website problems, birth control coverage causing wanton sex or anything else opponents can drum up.
Dench’s take on the Colorado ad sounds like some of the same sanctimonious rants I heard expressed about birth control in the 1960s — usually from men who, while condemning abortions, would deny women birth control; thus, untenable pregnancies inevitably occurred. For Dench to preside over anything called the “Informed Women’s Network” is a scary thought, given the politically male-based agenda she’s endorsing.
The maddening thing about all this is that the complications built into Obamacare were the design of Republican minds guarding their own. Romneycare was the Republican’s protect-the-insurance-companies answer to the more logical, single-payer, nonprofit system we should be embracing. Medicare-for-all would free employers from the burden of offering health care coverage to employees while trying to compete in a world where every other developed country calls health care a right — not a privilege — and puts that obligation on the whole society. It would put controls in place that would limit the predatory pricing of the pharmaceutical industry and sometimes multi-million dollar salaries of some hospital CEOs.
The result of our screwed-up, profit-based system is that Americans are discovering they can fly to other countries and get complicated surgeries done professionally and well at a tenth the cost being charged by U.S. hospitals.
And speaking of U.S. hospitals, our country’s present system of pushing the uninsured through emergency room doors is a poor excuse for efficient care. It is by far the most expensive, least productive and least caring way of helping those fellow human beings who have been, up until now, denied the protection of affordable health insurance.
Republican politicians like to claim that America has the best health care system in the world. In fact, it comes in somewhere around 30th — unless you are very, very, very rich. Only the very rich in this country (like all workers in France) enjoy the care of doctors who make house calls. Only the very rich in this country (like ordinary citizens in Canada or Europe) don’t have to worry about devastating co-payments and coverage caps driving them into bankruptcy when they get cancer. In this country, getting sick and losing your house and life savings is a regular routine. It’s a leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S.
The Affordable Care Act is not the whole answer, but it is a good beginning. If the Republicans would get off their high horse for a minute and agree to do something useful, we could quickly fix any incidental problems the Affordable Care Act — like any new, comprehensive program — is bound to contain. Given the level of stupid complaints we’ve heard from them thus far, though, I’m not holding my breath.
Lee Witting is pastor of the Union Street Brick Church in downtown Bangor. He is a former managing editor of the Spectator, a monthly publication for and about the U.S. insurance industry.