Wound Care

Health care in the US was an open, festering wound that Obamacare has done little more than spray with Bactine. But for all its flaws…

Obamacare is flawed. Not as flawed as the health care system it replaced, but flawed nonetheless.

Five and a half years ago, just before the 2008 election, I wrote this in a blog post:

“How well I remember the early days of the Clinton administration, when Bill Clinton tried to make good on his campaign promises to reform health care. He placed his wife Hillary in charge of the operation and she tried, oh how she tried, but in her efforts to change a fundamental way Washington worked she found that there was far too much Washington to change. The Clinton health care effort met so much resistance in congress that it was abandoned and never saw the light of day. And we still don’t have proper health care.” (Days of Future Past, November 2, 2008)

And the years passed. Now we have another election under our belts, but we still don’t have what I would call proper health care. The fact is that for all that the Right likes to call Obama a Socialist, he’s anything but a Socialist. I know this because I used to be a Socialist (I got better) and where health care is concerned I suppose I still am.

My main complaint regarding “Obamacare” (or the "Affordable Care Act" if you prefer) is that it keeps control of health care in the hands of the insurance industry, who screwed it up in the first place. Never mind that “Big Insurance” has fought Obama on this. I honestly can’t understand the insurance industry for that; certainly, they now have to cover pre-existing conditions and they can no longer sell “junk” policies to everyone, but Obamacare has guaranteed their control over health care for at least a decade into the future, probably two.

Health care in the US was an open, festering wound that Obamacare has done little more than spray with Bactine.

Like I said before, I’m still something of a Socialist on this issue. But let’s leave my own desire for a proper single-payer system out of the discussion for the time being.

Yes, there are problems with Obamacare, it doesn’t work as well as it should in several areas, but I still think it’s better than what we had before. It has problems.The problem with the problems is that the Right has such a problem with Obamacare that they’re unwilling to offer any real solutions to these problems, other than to repeal the whole damn thing. They won’t even try to address Obamacare’s remaining issues, which are far from insurmountable if only Congress would work together to find a way to make it workable.

It bothers me that where Obamacare doesn’t work, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives can’t see past their hatred for Obamacare (or just their hatred for Obama) to try to make it work. Republicans seem to like to say that America already had the best health care in the world, but while it may look that way from the top it certainly doesn’t look that way from the bottom, the view most of us have of it. That “best in the world” assertion is impossible to support.

There are/were issues that desperately need/needed to be addressed, and Obamacare at least addresses/addressed them. Ignoring them won’t make them go away. I haven’t heard anything from the Republican side that is workable, or that rises much above the level of a vague promise that they’ll come up with something (they promise!) but before they do we must repeal the law that exists. For that matter, the Democrats don’t appear to be too keen on improving the system we have, either (but at least they’re not saying that the whole thing needs to be scrapped and replaced with political vaporware).

I really feel that the best way for the nation to go is toward a single-payer health care system, what truly would amount to socalized medicine, but you’d never get that through Congress and an electorate that sees anything “Socialist” as evil even if they don’t understand the word. I really believe that what American health care needs is to get control of it right out of the hands of the insurance companies. But I am enough of a realist to admit that Obamacare, with its faults, is close to being the best system we’re likely to get.

The Blues Viking

The thoughts expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.