Discussion About Obamacare - Essay Example

?A Discussion About Obamacare When Barack Obama, who is almost a dead ringer for Denzel Washington, was elected president, one of the platforms that helped catapult him to the White House was his program of universal healthcare. He promised to get each and every American covered by insurance with very little to no inconvenience to them. This pet project of his was given the name “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010” . It's main purpose was to reform healthcare insurance and provide near universal healthcare coverage for the American people. Seen as form of socialized medicine similar to that currently existing in the United Kingdom for its subjects, his healthcare reform bill placed the mandate of healthcare coverage in the hands of the federal government (“Background on Healthcare”). Obamacare, as the act came to be more popularly known, wanted to take away the decision making process about insurance details from the hands of the coverage holder, the American public, and rest that power in the hands of the federal government instead. The idea being that if the government controlled the health insurance industry, then costs would be lowered fro coverage. This would then make health insurance more affordable for all concerned. But the wording of the healthcare act is so confusing that the Duck Dynasty cast would probably have enjoyed using the bill for target practice. Insurance companies would have been expected to undergo a reform in their policies and procedures pertaining to patient coverage as they would now be forced to cover pre-existing conditions for patients who required medical treatment. Obamacare was supposed to be the defender of the patient's rights. Siding with the patient on every issue pertaining to the use of health insurance while the insurance companies would be compelled by the federal government to do their jobs properly every time from the moment the bill was passed. While President Obama held lofty goals and ambitions for his rock-star health care act and defended it like Bret Bielema trying to get his quarterback to score a touchdown, he failed to review the actual and minuscule content of the bill before he signed it. With over 319 pages of reading material, his opponents saw the flaws of the bill but the president and his cronies in the legislative body of the country turned a blind eye to it. Without realizing that their over-confidence and lack of regard for the American people would eventually come back to haunt them. With the country already reeling from the effects of a double recession, Obamacare was still passed by congress. A move that left the president smug and happy as he stood with his cohorts on the day that he signed the bill. Like a spoiled brat, he got what he wanted without regard for the people whose lives are directly affected by the act. Arguments against Obamacare were quite solid and with evidence. The oppositionists reminded the public and the pro-Obamacare supporters that the bill would actually end up killing American jobs because insurance plans would need to be changed and the employer-employee division may be too steep for either party to cover using their meager income during a time of nationwide financial hardship and lack of available job opportunities. Although the president promised that people would get to keep the healthcare plan that they had, enjoyed, and needed, the GOP said that would not be the case because the health insurance costs would skyrocket. That would happen even with the healthcare rationing system in the hands of the federal government (“Background on Obamacare”). Right now, Obamacare is in a state of disarray and is utterly unenforceable due to the technical glitches the sign up website is constantly experiencing, the fact that people lost their existing healthcare plans when the president said they would not, and various states, in an act of rebellion and defiance ala Hunger Games refuses to implement the program. In an ironic way that art imitates life, the novel by Suzanne Collins actually parallels the current condition of the American healthcare and social system. As David Goodfried explained it on The Dylan Ratigan Show when explaining why the Hunger Games novels parallel American life and the great social divide that is made further evident by the Obamacare coverage: ... look more closely, and you’ll see a commentary on our own country. The people in the movie’s Capitol district are wealthy, pampered, living the life of luxury. The people in the outlying districts, who must send their children to die, are poor, starving, destitute, living in primitive conditions. It’s the 99 percent! And the 1 percent! (qtd. in Vamburkar). It is my opinion that this is the policy by which the Obama administration will be remembered by. A failed policy that did nothing to actually improve the healthcare benefits of the American people and instead, served to further burden the public with increased cost of insurance coverage. This was a vanity policy that no longer has a chance to be revised and adjusted in terms of content and implementation because the bill has already been passed and implemented with great failure. This healthcare bill is evidence of the deceit that the American people have been putting up with under President Obama. Nothing he told the people about the bill turned out to be true. Rather than lowering healthcare costs, it increased the cost of coverage per person. Instead of allowing people to keep their existing healthcare plan, their plans were canceled instead. The ease of healthcare purchase was also one of the biggest lies we were fed. The website has yet to function outside of beta test mode and should in fact, never have been launched in its current state. While I agree that universal healthcare is something that every tax-paying American is entitled to, I believe that the Obamacare act is not the answer to those needs. Otherwise, the president would not have delivered a mea culpa message on television to apologize for the debacle. At the moment congress has passed a bill aimed at reinstating the insurance policies that got canceled when Obamacare went active (Hughes, Siobhan & Hook, Janet “House Passes Bill to Reinstate Insurance Policies”). That is not the sign of a well thought out and implemented healthcare plan. That is the sign of a government that has no idea what it is doing. Unfortunately for the American people, we have become pawns in this game of “Let's play president”. At this point, not even the president is smiling at the way his healthcare game has played out. It is not what the public wanted and it is nothing like what he envisioned and promised the people during his campaign speeches eithers. This is one one game where nobody can be declared a winner and everyone can be declared losers. For those reasons, the Obama healthcare act will go down in the annals of American history as one of the high profile failed healthcare acts. It actually managed to outshine its predecessor upon which this current law is based, the aptly named Hilary Care bill of former first lady, ex-senator, and previous secretary of state, all of which jobs she failed to do properly, Hilary Clinton. Works Cited “Background on Healthcare”. OnTheIssues. ontheissues.org. n.d. Web. 8 Nov. 2013. “Background on Obamacare”. freedomworks.org. freedomworks.org. 2013. Web. 9 Nov. 2013. Hughes, Siobhan & Hook, Janet. “House Passes Bill to Reinstate Insurance Policies”. The Wall Street Journal. wsj.com. 15 Nov. 2013. Web. 15 Nov. 2013. Vambukar, Meenal. “MSNBC Guest Compares The Hunger Games to Obamacare Battle”. mediaite. com. mediaite.com 27 Mar. 2012. Web. 7 No. 2013. Read More