

Obama’s healthcare demise is his own fault


Courtesy AP.

It doesn’t look good for President Obama’s healthcare law. Aside from the Supreme Court’s liberal enclave of Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, there isn’t much enthusiastic support for the government mandate to purchase healthcare. There is a better chance of Rick Santorum presiding over a same-sex marriage than Clarence Thomas voting to uphold the law. It doesn’t look like Chief Justice Roberts, or Justices Scalia or Alito are jumping up to be the first to uphold the law, and Justice Kennedy may not rock the boat as much as the Obama administration would hope. There’s plenty of bickering across the political aisle, as conservatives rail against the liberal bias of the court while liberals bemoan the conservative bloc. But it’s beyond the point. Health care reform should never have made it to the Supreme Court. There shouldn’t be a debate over a government mandate. Right now, in 2012, we should have the best standard of health care in the world, one that would only come from a single-payer system.

It boggles the mind that the United States, a country many picture to be the pinnacle of success, has a horrible track record of caring for its citizens. We lag behind Slovenia, Hungary, and wait for the kicker, Cuba, in infant mortality rates. Fifty countries are ahead of us in life expectancy, and of developed nations, we’re third in terms of “Years of Potential Life Lost,” which measures the amount of years lost that could have been prevented with healthcare. It should be obvious our system is not working.

It’s a simple equation. People need medical care. As we’ve seen in dozens of other countries, it’s possible to have a system that provides health care for all people. But that’s not what President Obama wanted to do. The idea of a single-payer healthcare system was never on the table. He pandered to the idea of a public option, lying to the American people, while killing that idea to the for-profit health lobby. The attempts by his administration to provide health care for all were nothing more than a masquerade to pick up votes for this election year. Now, if the health care law is struck down, President Obama faces a much more difficult re-election battle. Luckily for him, his challenger will either be a religious nutcase or Mitt Romney, who many voters believe implemented the same system as Obama. He’s lucky, but the American people are not. Still, tens of thousands of people die each year because they don’t have health insurance. We could have left this debate in the dust. There shouldn’t be any talk of insurance, co-pays, HMO’s, or any of the other sick products of a profit-hungry system that doesn’t bat an eye when a mother or a father is torn from the hands of their children because of a preventable illness, one that should have been overcome, but the hole in their wallets was too much for the insurance companies, ruthless sharks in an infested sea of greed, to handle.

But of course even if Obamacare is overturned, who cares? Not the judges or the politicians, all of whom have fully-funded healthcare paid for by you and me. They don’t care about you or your parents, your aunts and uncles, or the kid down the block who just needs to see a doctor. Why should they? You don’t have a million dollars to contribute to a campaign, so you’re useless. Get out of their way while they use your suffering for political points. Our suffering is just currency in their twisted game of lies, bribery, and callous indifference.

Obamacare is a band-aid, a shameless pandering to insurance companies who now will have each and every American under their control. If it is struck down, it will only confirm the need for true health care reform, to rid ourselves of profit-hungry greed and work together, hand in hand, for the common good and the personal health of each and every citizen who makes up this nation. Liberals shouldn’t glare at conservatives and accuse them of not caring for the needy. Everyone should look into themselves and realize that everything we’ve been offered is a cheap concession. We need real change, real progress, if we ever want to hold ourselves to the standards we seem to push on nations elsewhere. How can we consider the United States a beacon of prosperity when the most vulnerable of us all are left to die?

But there is hope, no matter how dark a sky I’ve painted. While it is the very same politicians who quote Christ to high heaven, yet refuse to put into action the ideas he preached, it is the average American who has the power to push for change. The American Spring is upon us, and it is our time to fight for what we deserve. There is no reason why we can’t give quality care to all who need it. People have come together, century after century, to each others side. Humanity has raised itself out of pits before, and I’m sure it’s possible, in the 21st century, to give someone a damn doctor when they need it. Is it too much to ask?

Devin Wallace

7 Responses

  1. Fax says:

    While the single-payer system is the best method, you completely neglect to acknowledge the fact that it wouldn’t have gotten through Congress in a million years. That does have something to do with Obama’s decision to pass an amended version, don’t you think?

  2. Devin Wallace says:

    No, I don’t. There were plenty of Senators and Congressmen (Sanders and Kucinich, for example) who were ready to lead the charge. Single-payer was supported by almost every consumer health care organization and the American people.

    Not to mention President Obama didn’t even try. For him, single-payer was never on the table. In public, the public option was, but as we know, that was a complete lie.

  3. Fax says:

    Again, I ask you to look at this logically, which you are not. Although there were people ready to spearhead the campaign, it doesn’t mean the campaign would have gotten more than two feet off the ground. It was difficult enough to pass the amended version. The single-payer system simply never would have happened. You need to look at the facts of the situation before pointing fingers. Trying for a single-payer system, given the makeup of Congress at the time, would have been a colossal waste of time.

  4. Devin Wallace says:

    Even if we assume that, why lie to the public about a public option? You can’t deny there wasn’t enough support for that.

  5. Liberal Bias says:

    This is very informative. I’m hoping that quality care could be provided to all who need it!

  6. Zack Kilmer says:

    I’m sorry, could you explain what you mean by “Single Payer.” You were kind of vague in what that is and how it would be better than Obamacare.

  7. Devin Wallace says:

    It comes in a few different forms, from everyone being covered by a Medicaid/Medicare type of program, where the government pays for health insurance, or as in my view, a system of locally controlled, public hospitals similar to the public education system.

    All Obamacare was, aside from a few more regulations on insurance companies, was a use of force by the government to drive more consumers into the hands of insurance companies.