The Republican Congress tried to stop it too many times to count. They even shut down the federal government and threatened to destroy our nation’s credit rating by refusing to allow the government to sell debt instruments or raise taxes to cover the deficit. All this was done for one purpose. To stop the Affordable Care Act from doing what it was designed to do: expand healthcare coverage to millions of Americans without it, and to make it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage to Americans.
Even the New York Times is forced to admit that, despite all the obstacles placed in its path by Republican politicians, despite the difficulties in rolling out the first ever federal program to expand health care coverage to millions of Americans, despite the incredible stupidity and or evil intentions of Republican governors to refuse to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid coverage to the most vulnerable and most in need of health care in their states, the Affordable Care Act will improve the lives of millions of Americans starting today.
WASHINGTON — Millions of Americans will begin receiving health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday after years of contention and a rollout hobbled by delays and technical problems. The decisively new moment in the effort to overhaul the country’s health care system will test the law’s central premise: that extending coverage to far more Americans will improve the nation’s health and help many avoid crippling medical bills.
Starting Wednesday, health insurance companies can no longer deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and cannot charge higher premiums to women than to men for the same coverage. In most cases, insurers must provide a standard set of benefits prescribed by federal law and regulations. And they cannot set dollar limits on what they spend on “essential health benefits” for a policyholder.
Will everything go perfectly? Of course not. Then again, for years things have gone horribly wrong for so many people because our government, alone among the developed world, refused to adopt rational policies to expand health care coverage and decrease rising health care costs. Policies in place in countries as different as Japan, France, Sweden, Germany, Canada, and yes, Cuba. As a result we had millions of individual bankruptcies caused by medical bills for which families lacking adequate coverage could afford. We had the highest rate of infant mortality in the developed world. We had millions of people whom were essentially un-insurable because they had a “pre-existing” condition. We had a private sector which spent more money for “administrative costs as opposed to payment for medical claims than any other health care system in the developed world. We had the ignominy opf health insurance executives making obscene salaries even as their insurance companies denied claims that destroyed the lives of millions of their “policy-holders” not to mention the lives of their families.
The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect. But so was Social Security and Medicare when they were first introduced. Over time, as people learned of the benefits from those programs they demanded improvements, and improvements were made. The Affordable Care Act is a good beginning. Five years ago I didn’t believe anything even half as good would ever be passed through Congress. Ever. So today we should celebrate. Then tomorrow, we should get to work, advocating for new laws and reforms to improve the ACA. The effort to improve health care for “we, the people” is far from over, but it has finally begun.
Thank you, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and every current and former Senator and House Member who voted for passage of the ACA. Now get back to work making it better.
And, for all of you here, please take the time to let your Congressional Representatives, regardless of party affiliation, know that you support the ACA, but that you also expect them to work to make it better – to cover more people, to offer more benefits, to work more efficiently – and to stop trying to make it fail. Let them know you are watching them. Like a hawk.
