Thomas Donlan‘s latest editorial commentary for Barron’s looks beyond the HealthCare,gov rollout mess and focuses on more substantive challenges on the horizon for the so-called Affordable Care Act.
President Barack Obama often dismisses objections to his signature health-insurance plan as just an example of the partisan hostility that gets in his way.
Describing the conflict, the president sees “this incredible organized effort to block the notion that everybody should have affordable health care in this country.”
If that were the issue, Obama might be right. But opposition to Obamacare has less to do with affordable health care and more to do with unaffordable burdens. It does not significantly change the U.S. health-care system; it adds another unneeded layer of economic fantasy.
In the zero-sum game of contemporary politics, partisanship does loom large. But Obamacare has the opposition it deserves.
Obama frequently complains that the Democrats who drafted the law took many of the important elements from past Republican proposals. He asks: Why were there no Republican votes in Congress for ideas some of them had supported in the past?
He’s right to ask. But he may not like one of the most important answers: Like so many other schemes left over from the era of Teddy Roosevelt, Obamacare is impractical. It springs from a long bipartisan tradition of kidding the public about health care and health insurance.
Another name for Obamacare could be Nixoncare. In February 1974, President Richard M. Nixon presented a plan for universal health insurance that, like Obamacare, featured a mandate for employers to provide health insurance to their full-time employees, a mandate for individuals without employer insurance to buy it, and continuation of the Medicare program. Unlike Obamacare, Nixoncare would have replaced the Medicaid program with private insurance paid for by the feds for those who could not afford it.
