By Chris Cronin
Staff Columnist
When Barack Obama entered office in 2009, he found the nation’s healthcare system in an abysmal state. According to a report by the Kaiser Foundation, the number of non-elderly Americans without health insurance was 43.4 million in 2007, and it was rising—by 2010, that number had grown to 49.1 million. Even worse, the system was preventing people who could normally afford insurance from getting the coverage they needed. I have seen first-hand people with the means to buy insurance being forced to sell their homes in order to raise money to treat an illness not covered due to pre-existing conditions. The richest country in the world had a full sixth of its population at risk of ruin or death due to a broken system.
President Obama and congressional Democrats sought to take action to fix, or at least aalliviate the problem, beginning to draft what would become the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. After announcing their plans, they were beset with intense resistance from the Republican Party—resistance which has been characterized by hypocrisy and misinformation. Because health care has been and will be a key issue during the election, it is time to dispel these myths once and for all.
The main Republican attack strategy on PPACA has two prongs. One prong hits the program on cost, claiming that it will substantially increase the deficit. The other prong asserts that forcing people to buy health insurance (the individual mandate) is an unprecedented violation of freedoms that will increase costs for businesses. This is simply not true. Mandating the purchase of insurance will actually reduce costs, not increase them. By forcing everyone to buy in, even people who assume they will be healthy and therefore do not want to buy insurance, insurance companies will see increased revenue which they can return to customers as reduced premiums.
And although so-called “healthy” people may believe that they are not vulnerable to illness or injury, human frailty is universal; even the healthiest person is vulnerable to a host of utterly random illnesses, diseases, and disorders. When healthy uninsured people got injured under the previous system, they sought treatment in emergency rooms, which increased the costs put on hospitals. By mandating that these people get insurance before they get hurt, their insurance covers part of the cost of treating their injuries, reducing the financial burdens on the hospitals themselves.
Finally, the biggest lie of all PPACA centers on the lineage of the individual mandate. PPACA is partly modeled after Mitt Romney’s own healthcare plan, which was very successfully implemented in Massachusetts during his tenure in government. With the help of the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation, Romney’s plan included several key tenets which were later adapted into PPACA. The most significant tenet adopted was the individual mandate, which Heritage, a bastion of conservative policy and thinking, called “clearly consistent with conservative values” in 2006. There is nothing unprecedented about such a mandate—it is used in nearly every state to, for instance, mandate that all drivers purchase car insurance. Mitt Romney, in a 2009 editorial in USA Today, touted his success in implementing an individual mandate in Massachusetts:
“First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others,” he said.
Later that year, the Heritage Foundation called the individual mandate in PPACA, based on the very plan they had helped implement in Massachusetts, “both unprecedented and unconstitutional.” Romney has stated while campaigning that, if elected, he would repeal Obama Care on his first day in office.
Health care reform is a massive, convoluted endeavor, and PPACA will not fix every problem with the system. But the continuing debate over what course our nation’s health care system should be built on facts, not lies.