Why I like "Obamacare"

I haven't cared much for the term "Obamacare", mainly because it's pejorative usage quickly became more about the President and less about the care.  I saw in a Politico article today that the Obama campaign has decided to embrace the term and emphasize the things that people like about the Affordable Care Act, often until they learn that these things are a part of it.  I think that's wise.  There is no point for the re-election campaign to try to pretend that President Obama didn't have anything to do with it, so they should try to turn the term of abuse to their advantage.

I suppose this is a planned bumper sticker:

What do I like about Obamacare?

First, it's a first step, and an important one, on the goal of providing real access to health care to all Americans.  I have trouble understanding how anyone can oppose that as a goal, although there can be different ways of reaching that goal.  The Catholic Church expressly considers access to basic health care to be part of the common good, which everyone has a right to enjoy.  My own denomination, the Episcopal Church, as well as many others, also supports the creation of a system that provides basic health care.  When people talk about repealing Obamacare, we should ask what they would set in its place and how would that point us towards that goal?

Second, on a personal level, Obamacare has allowed us to include our adult son on my health insurance policy.  Before, when he turned 22, he came off my policy and the only options were far more expensive.  According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 2.5 million more young adults now have health insurance because of this.  Because this group is generally very healthy, the impact on premiums has been small (about 1%). 

Third, preventive services, including cancer screenings, vaccinations, and well-child visits, are now provided with no co-pay, co-insurance or deductible.  I make a point of reviewing my plan each year and I had always been amazed at how poorly we covered preventive services.  We would make it more expensive for the patient to be checked than to treat the preventable disease, even if the cost of the health care needed to treat the disease was far more expensive!  With this new requirement of Obamacare, we will spend less over time and have a generally healthier society.

Fourth, insurance companies can no longer cancel your insurance coverage, often retroactively, because of a technical mistake or minor omission on an application.  This was called rescission, and would usually happen when you had a major, expensive, illness.  Your company would go back and look for a technical reason to rescind your policy and not only refuse to cover you, but demand that you repay anything they had paid on your behalf!  Now, to do this, the company has to show that you intentionally misrepresented or omitted significant information.

Fifth, a serious illness will no longer prevent a person from having access to affordable insurance.  Some people have been uninsured, not by choice, but because they have pre-existing conditions that caused them to either be unable to get insurance at all or they had to get policies that excluded the condition that was most likely to cause them to need health care in the first place!  In the 1980s, when I was director of the child support office in Montgomery, Alabama, one of my clients could not afford to get off welfare (which she wanted to do) because she would then lose her Medicaid coverage and one of her children had a severe medical condition that would not be insurable.  Now, under Obamacare, the Pre-Existing Insurance Plan, or PCIP, provides primary and specialty care, hospital care, and prescription drugs, with no exclusions for pre-existing conditions.  A citizen or legal resident must have been without coverage and either have a pre-existing condition or been denied coverage because of one. 

And these are things that are in effect now. 

We need to remember what the point of health insurance is.  It is to spread the costs of health care more evenly across the population over time.  I have had health insurance through my employer for over 26 years.  In all but two of those years, I likely paid more in premiums than my plan paid out for my health care, so in those years I helped cover other peoples' costs, with the understanding that this could have to work the other way.  And it did.  In 2010, I paid far, far less in premiums than my plan paid for my health care.  So other people helped cover my health care in 2010.  And there is nothing wrong with this, in either direction!  This is how a community works, helping one another for the common good.