Animosity Towards Affordable Care Act Is Hard To Fathom
Animosity Towards Affordable Care Act Is Hard To Fathom
October 5th, 2013 12:00 am Cynthia Tucker
Rena W. is a 35-year-old small-business owner — the co-owner, actually, of an Atlanta hair salon. She works hard but doesn’t make enough money to purchase health insurance.
A mother of three, Rena has high cholesterol and hypertension. Last month, she suffered a mini-stroke, a calamity that brought confusion, a brief bout of aphasia and a trip to the emergency room. She has recovered, but now owes the hospital $17,000 for her treatment, a debt that she says will take her years to repay.
Rena is just the sort of hardworking American for whom the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — routinely called “Obamacare” — is designed. She can now purchase a policy that will pay for the medical care she needs and insure against any more medical emergencies. (If only she’d had that insurance a bit sooner, she would not be burdened by debt.)
But for reasons that are hard to grasp, Republicans are apparently willing to throw the American economy over the cliff — and to further destabilize an already-shaky global economy, as well — just to keep Rena from being able to buy affordable health insurance. If the government shutdown doesn’t force President Obama to forsake his signature legislative accomplishment, many Republicans say, they will refuse to lift the debt ceiling, sending the country into default for the first time in history.
Again, this is all to prevent people like Rena from being able to purchase health insurance.
Having listened to the inflammatory, paranoid and highly creative debate over Obamacare since 2009, having witnessed countless Tea Party rallies and heard numerous critics outline the law’s alleged dangers, I still don’t understand the motives of its most deranged adversaries. I do know that all the other industrialized democracies ensure that the vast majority of their citizens have access to medical care, and none of those nations have gone up in smoke. They endure, with populations who are at least as healthy as Americans and who pay much less for their doctor’s visits and medicines.
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