It is a great and comforting validation that people with large megaphones and big mouths have focused on the ailing website of the Affordable Care Act. They show us that naked self-promotion of individual and collective stupidity lives on in perpetuity.
Opponents of Obamacare wail and wring hands over the website. That dysfunctional site alone is reason enough to kill the entire program, they tell us. And it is evidence and proof of the folly and unconstitutional core of the entire Act, they insist. In their claimed clairvoyance they bray over what is in the heads of those who led us to such evil, although how they got into others’ heads is not explained. And now they have fixated their mean spirited, laser beam of antagonism on the website.
I must have been absent from class when they explained that the main purpose of reforming healthcare in America was a website. That is similar to the day I missed class when they explained all about death panels.
Full disclosure: I have not read all 2,500 pages of the Affordable Care Act, so I may be misinformed.
But my understanding is that the Act is designed to remove limitations on coverage for healthcare, this in order to promote better medical care for Americans. I thought it was to stop insurance companies from collecting premiums and then refusing to pay for the medical care that was supposed to be covered. I thought it was to make it so that poor people stopped using the emergency ward at their closest hospital for their primary care and instead steer themselves to primary care physicians. That is supposed to help catch medical issues earlier in order to promote better health and to lower overall healthcare costs for everyone.
It has been my understanding that Obamacare really isn’t about medical decisions. It is about how we fund medical care and all the changes for the better that will bring. There are no specific medical procedures that are prescribed or prohibited by the Act. That is between you and your doctor.
All of that is in place, with or without a facile website.
The ACA website and phone center will be incrementally improved in an ongoing program, just as such things are for most endeavors. So, while the current website is operating at a sub-optimal level, it is quite beside the point. That is, it’s beside the point for all of us except for the self-promoting political hystericals, locked in their rending of garments and feigned woe. What a bummer it will be for them when the website is fixed. They will have to find some other phantom horribleness over which to go all googly-eyed.
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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