Might Obama Still Win the Health Care Legacy Fight, It IS NOW Looking Possible

I don't want to jump the gun on this, but after seeing Paul Ryan blabber his way though another interview on many issues and then reading the column I will link to below, I think the headline is true.

I would rather be skiing today in the semi-blizzard that is hitting us right now, but I wasn't up for driving 2 to 3 hours through it both ways to do so.  So here is one day when I would rather be living in BTV.

Anyway, despite Paul Ryan saying the GOP was working on a replacement for ObamaCare, it turns out that are not even talking about it quietly.  I have gone into these reasons ad nauseum in prior posts, but I will do so again for any new readers.

The ACA, aka ObamaCare, was designed by the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank.  It was designed to keep the private health insurance market solvent so it would be a viable alternative to Universal Health Insurance provided by the Federal Government, while controlling the aggregate cost of health care in the economy, which in the U.S. is close to 20% of GDP vs 10%-12% of most of the rest of the Industrial World.  And of course, the 1st Governor to implement this design was Gov. Romney the 2012 GOP candidate for President.

So, the ACA is the best design the GOP has for controlling the aggregate cost of health care while not adopting a single payer health insurance plan, or even a public option for people who don't have health insurance through their employer and have too much money to be on Medicaid, the state run national plan for providing health insurance to the poor.

Of course, the key is forcing younger healthy people to buy health insurance so those who get cancer or some other horrible illness can be treated in a timely manner and are covered and older people who have even more go wrong sometime and with frequency can afford to buy health insurance.

And while I think all of this is an argument to offer Medicare for All as an option, the GOP doesn't want to do that and they don't want to require everybody to buy health insurance, except that is the only way the ACA can work.  You have to require that healthy people share in the risk pool financially because they will end up in the risk pool eventually.  It's the same risk sharing principle behind every other kind of insurance and even why we pay taxes to support the public safety system, the judicial system (to protect our rights) and to pay for national defense.

Link to WAPO column that prompted this