ObamaCare: How Much Are You Willing to Sacrifice?

posted at 10:36 am on October 15, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Elections ]   

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama made repeated trips to rust belt states like Michigan to assure workers that a vote for him was a vote for job security. When he reneged on that promise within three months of winning the election by making General Motors a ward of the state, auto workers were understandably vexed. So what did President Obama do to quell the unrest? He went back to Michigan and made a speech, explaining how it could have been worse.

We saw 400,000 jobs lost in the auto industry in the year before this restructuring even began. I will not pretend the hard times are over. Difficult days lie ahead. More jobs will be lost. More plants will close. More dealerships will shut their doors, and so will many parts suppliers.

Then he said this: “I want you to know that what you’re doing is making a sacrifice for the next generation.”

That wasn’t the first time the president had mentioned sacrifice. It came up even before the inauguration. Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” in January, Obama made it clear that everyone was going to have to sacrifice in order to bring about the massive reform agenda he had mapped out for America.

Don’t get me wrong. I think sacrifice is a beneficent and noble act. I know of no conscientious parent who hasn’t or wouldn’t sacrifice for his child.

The problem is that a yawning chasm separates making the choice to sacrifice to achieve a result that you desire and being forced to sacrifice to arrive at end that someone else has decided is “in your best interest” or that “serves the greater good.” The second, if the word dare be uttered, is a principal tenet of socialism.

But let’s not go there. Let’s talk instead about health care reform. This too will exact a rather weighty sacrifice on the part of the American people, though the president so far hasn’t breathed a word about it. I’m not talking about the enormous burden of crippling debt that will be passed on to future generations, even though that will be quite a sacrifice too. I’m talking about making a sacrifice here and now. I’m talking about the sacrifice that people who are currently ill and/or uninsured are going to need to make.

Obama has met, or at least heard from, some of those people. He took questions from several of them at an AARP health care tele-town hall on July 28 designed to rally support for his plan from AARP members. One which came via email was from a man who wrote:

My brother’s 56 and uninsurable. He could afford to buy insurance, but he can’t get it because he has a pre-existing condition, and in his state there is not a high-risk pool. When the president’s program starts, will insurance companies be required to cover people with pre-existing conditions? Will he be able to get insurance in the first phase of the plan, even if he’s willing to pay the full amount?

Another, the now-famous “donut hole” question, was posed by a Denver woman named Sarah who had Parkinson’s and was two years away from exhausting her savings.

What Obama should have said — would have said if he were being forthright — is that his plan would do nothing for either of them, not unless they could tough it out for another 6 years, which is the earliest date when any plan under consideration would kick in. And even then the benefits might do little since the plan won’t be fully operational until 2017.

What he should have said is that his plan was not really designed to help people who are gravely ill or uninsured at present. What he should have said is that he was counting on these people to make a sacrifice — in some cases the supreme sacrifice — for the greater good.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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