Nearly a week has passed since the big 1-year anniversary of the health care bill becoming law and, upon reflection, I would say we, as a nation, have not progressed one inch in the past 12 months.
Republicans are still convinced that the law is a monolithic “takeover” of the insurance business that will raise health care premiums and cost the federal budget hundreds of billions of dollars. Democrats ignore the troubling insurance cost issues that linger and the flaws that have emerged in the Massachusetts health care system, which was essentially the model for the national law.
More discouraging is that the voters still have not succeeded in sorting all this out. Polls show that many Americans are still confused about the law. And those same surveys indicate a huge partisan divide on this issue still prevails, with Democrats solidly in favor and Republicans strongly opposed.
In a conference call last week with reporters from across the nation, four congressional Democrats, including Sandy Levin, made their best case that health care is a success story and the dire GOP predictions of 2009-10 have fallen flat.
Levin, top-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said that the GOP had quickly passed a bill to repeal health care in its entirety, but never followed up after their legislation became stalled in the Senate.
They did not seek to repeal, Levin said, the extension of parental coverage to kids 26 and under; they did not seek to repeal unimpeded coverage for kids with pre-existing conditions; they did not seek to repeal the ban on lifetime limits for seriously ill persons; they did not seek to repeal the gradual effort to close the “donut hole” gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage for seniors; they did not seek to repeal the tax cuts offered to small businesses as an incentive to provide their employees coverage; and they did not seek to repeal the new requirement that wellness and prevention services, including cancer screenings, can no longer carry a co-pay for the health consumer.
And the reason for this long list of inaction is simple: The polls continue to show that the majority of Americans are not happy with the health care law, but each separate provision mentioned above receives overwhelming support in the polls. In most cases, the individual reforms that have already been put in place receive approval in the polls starting at 72 percent and up.
That’s the kind of lopsided survey results that the Republicans – or any Washington politician – will not ignore. So, the GOP will continue to push for repeal of health care, but not for any of the separate pieces of the reform law.
That’s the way the game is played.
Every time a Democrat announces all the goodies front-loaded into ObamaCare, he/she must immediately be challenged with the costs associated with those items. They are NOT free. Like most government regulations the costs ultimately are passed along to consumers, in this case those who purchase health insurance.