The American Dream Dictionary: Obama’s Health Care Reform Stays Intact

Republican efforts to abolish Obamacare, the health care reform introduced by Barack Obama, are — without any exaggeration — gargantuan. Fifty-four votes in the House of Representatives — none of them making any sense, because the Democrats had a majority in the Senate, and would have to accept them afterward. And even if it by chance did pass (which it didn’t), there is also the presidential veto, and Obama would of course rescue his most important reform.

To these Sisyphean works in Congress, the TV ads attacking Obamacare should be added. Its cost for the last four years has been $450 million.

Now, after Tuesday’s election, will the expected win finally come? Unfortunately not. In fact, the Republicans gained the majority in both chambers of Congress, but they still do not have the required two-thirds majority necessary to override the presidential veto.

Which does not seem to discourage them at all, because another vote to stop the Obamacare has already been announced for January 2015, right after the swearing-in of a new Congress.

Obamacare, passed in 2010 but just begun this year, is quite well, despite its false start. Last autumn, right at the beginning, the online registration system for new, state-subsidized health insurance crashed. It was unusable for many weeks later.

There is no publicly funded health care in the United States — health insurance policies are private, or in packages from employers. Health care costs a regular family between several hundred dollars a month for the worst (covering only part of the costs of healing) to over $1,000 for the best.

Just one year ago, about 45 million Americans did not have any health insurance policy at all, except for short-term policies. In case a car accident happened to them, they were taken care of, but after leaving the hospital, they were receiving giant bills, often taking all their life’s work from them. Each year, over 1 million Americans go bankrupt due to the high costs of health care.

What is interesting is that these 45 million people are not the poorest ones, who have access to free health care from the Medicaid program. Elders over 65 years of age also receive free health care from Medicare. The bankruptcy threat concerns those who are a little bit above the poverty threshold (too much for Medicaid), but risk and decide not to buy any policy.

In addition, the American health care system is the most expensive in the world. Each year it takes 18 percent of U.S. GDP (7 percent in Poland, 9.5 percent in the U.K., 11 percent in Germany). And the effects of that are far from satisfactory — e.g., statistically, a Cuban citizen’s life span is the same as an American’s.

Obamacare is meant to sort this out in a few ways: First, it increases the number of people who qualify for free health care (Medicaid). Second, it introduces state donations to the health insurance system. Third, it obligates medium and large companies to offer corporate health insurance to its employees. Fourth, insurance companies cannot refuse to offer a policy to the chronically ill. And fifth, Obamacare introduces punishments for not having a health insurance policy. All who have enough money to buy it but decide not to will have to pay several hundred dollars more in taxes.

Republicans think that Obama imposed a socialist model of health care, and that he rapes the holy freedom of citizens by forcing them to buy a policy. But two years ago the Supreme Court decided that higher taxes for those who have no insurance do not violate the U.S. Constitution.

The dark truth that the right wing in the U.S. does not seem to accept yet is that they will probably never abolish Obamacare — even when its initiator leaves the White House. The machine has started working and it cannot be stopped. From early estimates it can be told that one year after the start of the reform, an additional 7 million Americans have state-subsidized health insurance policies, and another 4 million were added to Medicaid. It is hard to imagine this could be taken away from them.

The price of policies did not rise, as Republicans threatened, but in fact fell slightly (0.8 percent, according to the government-independent Kaiser Foundation).

The fact that Obamacare stays does not mean the Republicans will not attempt to pull individual bricks from it. There is an old trick used in Congress for that. Basically it is about adding some weird paragraphs to the new laws that do not seem to fit. For example, the Republicans want to abolish the 2.3 percent tax on selling on the sale of medical equipment introduced by Obamacare. They can add it as a paragraph to a new law that is important to Obama, such as the one granting legal status to millions of illegal immigrants. And Obama probably won’t resist the temptation — a blot on the landscape — and will give in. As long as the blot won’t be too large.