Obamacare is similar to former Gov. Mitt Romney’s Romneycare in Massachusetts, a plan endorsed by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. Though this was a right-wing plan, adopted by a center-right Obama, people cry, “Socialism!” Yet Obamacare further entrenches the private insurance industry and forces people to buy its faulty products. Premiums now are rising, and providers are dropping out.
Every other developed country has figured out how to provide better health outcomes for less money, but there is a barrage of disinformation about single-payer systems.
The elephant in the room is the profit motive. Profits thrive on scarcity, but we should be trying to provide health care for all. An insurance company or a pharmaceutical company or a stockholder is interested only in profit. Health care is secondary. This is sometimes literally a fatal flaw in our current system. But the profit motive reigns supreme, and humans remain cash cows to be milked by corporations from birth to burial.
With all of Obamacare’s needless complexities, many people now associate all its problems with government-run programs in general, not with with the inherent flaws of the private insurers on which it relies.
So, as well as costing Democrats a lot of votes, the Affordable Care Act may have set back the single-payer cause for a generation. We’re told by both Democrats and Republicans that our current system, based on private insurance, is the only workable one, despite there being many, many examples of successful alternatives.
Obamacare should be replaced - with Medicare for all.
David A. Sorensen
Duluth
