Among many other achievements of the now-departed year, 2010 marked the passage of H.R. 3590, otherwise known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The opposition for the new health care law, rather predictably, featured an exceptional mixture of bigotry, misinformation and downright hypocrisy.
It ranged from the formation of imaginary death panels to inevitable mentions of American political discourse’s favorite slippery-slope, which is, of course, socialism.
It is certainly a compliment to our discordant and inharmonious style of governance that this historic piece of legislation became law, albeit with the absence of the humanitarian, progressive and very much cost-effective backbone of the public option.
This year, however, seemed to have started with the winds of change blowing in a new direction. All across the country a movement to repeal the health care law has brought with it followers armed with lock-and-load rhetoric operating under a self-professed mandate from the American people.
This culminated in a vote in the House of Representatives last week by the newly elected Republican majority. The Affordable Care Act was repealed by a vote of 245-189. This is largely a symbolic act, as the Senate will likely not pass the bill, and President Obama would never sign it into law.
This time it wasn’t the arguments of “death panels” or “rationing” or even ironic slogans such as “government stay out of my Medicare” that acted as chief villains to the repeal-baby-repeal narrative. Rather it was a charge that this law kills jobs.
While Arizona took part in the resistance against the new law, it would have been prudent — or would be in future cases of legislative trickery of this kind — for us to consider and analyze the facts before jumping on the repeal bandwagon.
According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office — itself a nonpartisan entity — enactment of the health care law would produce a “net reduction in federal deficit in the amount of $143 billion over the 2010-2019 periods.”
Somebody needs to call our fiscally responsible friends.
The enacted reform has already provided benefits to the American people.
We now have the ability to find health insurance for children if they have pre-existing conditions as well as mandate for insurance companies to spend 80 or 85 cents of every received dollar from premium payments on health care rather than administrative costs, depending on the type of coverage they provide.
What do we make of this job-killing charge anyway?
Surely, if our elected officials make such assertions, the claim must be true.
Assuming that the use of hyperbole for political gain is not a part of American political discourse, we should be able to believe them, right? Sadly, no, we can’t.
Another CBO report clarifies this myth. “The expansion of Medicaid and the availability of subsidies through the exchanges will effectively increase beneficiaries’ financial resources. Those additional resources will encourage some people to work fewer hours or to withdraw from the labor market,” the report reads.
Reduction of labor means people won’t have to work because they will lose their health insurance if they don’t; that is positively different from killing jobs.
According to Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, people will work less because the tax cuts in the bill will “make their income more adequate to meet their needs.”
It seems as though in the course of trivializing government and governance, we have lost objectivity, what was once an all-American virtue.
On the other hand, trivializing governance is precisely what is to be expected when we have a supposed Kenyan-born, secretly Muslim, God-bashing socialist, African-American president.
Sohail can be reached at sbayot@asu.edu
