ObamaCare’s Relentless Creation of Second-Class Citizens (5)

[dreamnightwind]

75. Two excellent posts you made here

My take is that the previous system was too unregulated, costs were too out of control, and recission was creating a class of uninsurable people.

Some people use that perspective to make the case that the ACA is an improvement.

I think the opposite. I think the previous system was so ruthless and uncaring, determined to maximize profits with little to no concern of actually providing healthcare, that it soon would have collapsed under its own greed (it was close to that before the ACA, driving spending through the roof), bringing the country to the natural conclusion of that illness, our nation's immune system kicking in to rid ourselves of the infection before it killed us. The infecting agents are the health insurance corporations. We exchanged a deadly parasite that kills its host for a managed vampirism that will drain our resources in a more sustainable manner, keeping us alive but sick and poor. Very similar to the financial crash and rescue of the failed corporations.

We could have gotten to single payer by loudly making the case for it, over and over, as the out-of-control health insurance companies took more and more profit. By pointing out how pretty much every other country has a better solution to this problem, and looking at their implementations for examples, rather than rejecting them and looking for Obama's "uniquely American solution", which is actually uniquely corporate, and isn't Obama's so much as it is the insurance companies' attempt to prevent the real needed reform (their own termination) and tie us to them for the foreseeable future.

The crisis presented an opportunity to get it right, to educate the public about what the problem was. People run into it anyway in their dealings with the insurance companies, they already hate them, so a determined leader could have successfully made that case. Unfortunately too many politicians of both parties depend on too much campaign cash from corporate interests, so they kept the actual solution off the table, wouldn't even allow a single payer advocate to participate in the discussions.