Health Care and Horse Manure

Many people across the country, from both sides of the political spectrum, seem to be very upset that the president lied about people being able to keep their existing health plans and lied about the new policies being better and more affordable. I am not the least bit upset, because it was plainly and obviously a flat-out lie from the beginning. How can you enroll everyone, give everyone better coverage, and it cost less? You cannot. How can you change all the requirements and have people still be able to keep their old plans? You cannot. If you bought the lies, then I guess you have the right to be upset. I never bought the lies so I am not bothered by them. A fundamental principle of law is that one has no claim to have been defrauded unless one believed the lie. I can’t complain that you sell me horse turds for muffins if I was standing there and saw them fall from the horse. 

Today’s Mercury News headline is “Obama Relents on Flaw in Law.” What was the flaw? That it took effect precisely according to its terms? That it did exactly what it was written to do, known from the beginning? A flaw, in terms of the news, usually refers to something one did not see coming, such as the broken bolts on the Bay Bridge or premature transmission failure. If your transmission fails after 10,000 miles, call it a flaw and complain. If your car only has two seats, and only had two seats when you bought it, don’t take it back to the dealer and complain that it is a manufacturing defect. 

The whole Obamacare scheme was never about providing health care for the poor or insurance for the uninsured. It was always about bringing the entire health care system under government control. We have programs that provide food for the poor, but they do not (yet) require that all the stores and all the people who buy food from them comply with government dietary guidelines. They are tailored to fill a specific need. We have programs that provide housing for the poor and shelter for the homeless. They do not (yet) require that the homes of those of us who pay for our own meet government criteria for what they think best. Whatever anyone thinks about the advisability or management of those programs, they do not (yet) include all of us. I do not (yet) have to give all my income to the government, and be issued food stamps that can only be used in government-approved stores to buy things that some bureaucrat thinks are good for me. I can still buy soda pop and See’s Candies. A program to provide health care for the poor or insurance for the uninsured could have been tailored to meet that need without involving the vast majority of people who were doing just fine, if that had been the actual goal. But that was not the actual goal, any more than the actual goal of the rapist at the door is to use your phone.

There is much in the Affordable Care Act that is useful and good and much of that would have engendered little partisan opposition, either in Washington or in the public at large. It is not what it does for some people but what it does to so many others that has created the problem. It is easy to paint all opposition as being based on the desire to deny health care to poor people. It is not so easy to explain away the impact now that the train has hit the bus.