Speaking of Rush Limbaugh, his contention is that the Affordable Care Act was only incidentally about health care. The real point, he says, was getting that individual mandate into law, which would then establish the principle of unrestrained government control of our lives. The problem with that notion is that, after the conservatives abandoned it, the IM was almost no one's preferred approach to the goal of universal coverage. Certainly not Obama's, who advocated the public option. Others of us lefties wanted single payor or even a national health service. The IM was an unloved compromise. And I think the hope was that the IM would be, for the right, the least unpalatable path to universal coverage, thus provoking the least opposition. Well, that didn't work out too well. But maybe it would have worked out better if we had remembered why the IM was a conservative proposal in the first place: It was an anti-free rider measure. That is, it was to prevent uninsured people from getting free service courtesy of taxpayors. I see a lot of net posts raging against welfare recipients not having to take drug tests or people with food stamps buying cigarettes with the cash they don't have to spend on food. If we'd played to that rage by promoting the IM as the way to stop crackheads from remaining recklessly uninsured, blowing out a couple arteries in their brains, and leaving us to pay for their stroke care, the tea partying in all those townhalls two or three years ago might have been in support of Obamacare.
Posts
