When I wrote the other day that we were engaged simultaneously in three wars, I forgot completely about the fourth.
And then I was reminded that Wednesday was the one-year anniversary of the health care reform law — and time for renewed fighting in a battle without end.
It is being fought on many fronts, of course. In the courts, where opponents hope activist judges overrule Congress. On the airwaves. On the op-ed pages. Even the polling, which you’d think would be pretty straightforward, is up for grabs.
For example, a CNN poll shows that 37 percent favor the law and 59 percent oppose it. The numbers have been used by opponents to show that Americans still oppose the law. But if you look more closely, suddenly this paint-by-the-numbers picture looks a little different. Of those 59 percent against, 13 percent want the law to be stronger. So do the math. You have 37 percent who like the law, 13 percent who want the law to be more liberal, 46 percent who don’t want it all.
If you’re confused, then you’re like most Americans. The best polling I’ve seen on this is from Kaiser Health tracking poll, which finds 53 percent are, yes, confused about what’s actually in the law.
It’s a complicated law, which makes it easy to demagogue. And it’s a big law — you may have heard about the 2,000-plus pages — which makes anyone worried about big government nervous. And if you’re not nervous, you’re told that Obama wants to kill granny, take away your employer-provided insurance, damage Medicare, bankrupt the government and generally invite chaos.
The Obama-wants-to-make-things- worse argument doesn’t hold up to close inspection, however. It’s fair to say that the future of the Democratic Party rides on the success or failure of this law. If it’s so flawed and Republicans can get rid of it — through the courts or through defunding or by knocking off Obama in 2012 — they’ll be saving Democrats from long-term disaster.
Of course, if the law works and becomes accepted in the way that Social Security and Medicare have been accepted, well, you know what that means politically.
So far, the law is still mostly a hypothetical. Most of it doesn’t go into effect until 2014. What’s happened so far is that the Medicare doughnut hole has shrunk a little, insurance companies can’t exclude kids with pre-existing conditions, and parents can keep children on their insurance until age 26.
But the law is about more than its individual parts. You can break the argument down to whether you believe it’s important to have universal health insurance or whether it’s fine in America, alone among its Western peers, to have approximately 50 million uninsured.
And then there’s the concept — which everyone agrees to — that medical costs must come down. The argument isn’t whether America provides the best health care in the world. It’s about the inefficient, too-costly way in which America provides health care.
Take politics out of it — good luck there, by the way — and you can’t help but see something must be done. The law, which is too generous to insurance companies, helps on costs but should be better — and would be better if there had been honest debate on it. Of course, it’s not too late there.
It’s the individual mandate that now excites all the attention — even if that was originally a Heritage Foundation/Republican idea — but if you want to get at the real argument, read Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson’s op-ed that ran in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, which he begins by calling the law “the greatest single assault on our freedom in my lifetime.”
He tells the touching story of his daughter, Carey, who was born with a serious heart defect and was saved by doctors and by his company health insurance. He says that under Obamacare, he doesn’t know if his daughter would have survived with “government-defined” limits.
The liberal blogosphere went nuts. Jonathan Chait at the New Republic asked, sarcastically, “Why does Obama hate Ron Johnson’s daughter?”
The law is put in place, in large part, to ensure that all children get excellent care — and not just those whose parents have the best health insurance. The law sets minimum care requirements for insurance companies — not maximums. It stops insurance companies from denying coverage to sick children with pre-existing conditions. It makes sure that if a child’s parent loses a job and with it their health insurance, the child is still covered. It might even save children whose parents aren’t among the richest in the Senate.
And if you think of it that way, it’s not all that confusing.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@ denverpost.com.
