Obamacare! It’s a word thrown around all over the news. Bloggers, pundits, columnists, your co-workers, your neighbors, and even your spouse all have ideas on what health care is, what it isn’t, and what to do about it.
Sadly, in our society today, the basic facts of an issue are often completely eclipsed by the opinions of so-called “experts.” It can be difficult to have an informed opinion about something if you don’t even know what that something is (though that doesn’t stop many!) This article covers the very basics on health care reform. It won’t make you an expert, but it will equip you with enough basic information that you can follow the news on this hot-button topic for yourself and decide what you think. Not what the guys at Fox News think. Not what the politicians in the White House think. What YOU think.
Obamacare is a word created by pundits (media personalities) to describe the sweeping reforms to health care championed by President Obama. Obamacare is basically a form of Universal Health Care. It’s not completely universal health care (as of its current proposal, anyway), but the foundation of the entire Obamacare idea is closely based on universal health care.
The United States currently uses a Mixed Health Care system. Under this system, three groups basically provide health care: the government, businesses/large organizations, and you, the individual person. Many people point to several critical problems within our system. Many people are uninsured, because they are not elligible for government care, their employers don’t provide it (or they’re unemployed), and they cannot afford health care out of pocket. Other people do not like the moral implications when it comes to your health: the idea that the best medicine, the most-skilled health care professionals, and the best medical facilities are reserved for those with the money to pay for them. There are some who believe that everyone should have a right to be healed when injured or cared for when sick.
So to remedy those problems, a form of universal health care has been proposed. Universal health care, often also called Single System Health Care, is a system where a single party provides health insurance for everyone. When we talk about the U.S., we’re talking about our government being the “single party”; therefore, the government would provide health insurance to every single citizen in this country. That system, however, is also not without its faults: how can our government, already considered to be in dire financial straits, afford to insure every American?
When you look at the issue from this perspective, it looks pretty basic. Unfortunately, the issue of health care is tied to politics, and politics can be very, very complex. One of the foundations of Republican ideology is the idea of our national government being as small and unobtrusive in our daily lives as possible. Therefore, the idea of a universal health care system, heavily-regulated by the government, does not sit well with the G.O.P. (“Grand Old Party”, a nickname used to address the Republican Party). By contrast, the Democratic party believes in a strong central government that provides and protects its citizens. The idea that millions of Americans are under-insured or completely uninsured does not sit well with them. This is where the idea of partisanship comes in. Partisanship is basically loyalty to your chosen political party. When politicians talk about bi-partisanship, they’re really just talking about getting along with their political opponents.
Further complicating the political issues involved in instituting universal health care are all the other political issues that are connected to the idea of health care. Should a government-sponsored health care program cover abortions? Should a government-sponsored health care program cover illegal immigrants? What about drug addiction recovery? Mental health treatment? Birth control? These are all explosive political issues, and each one of them has to be considered very carefully when talking about what a health care program will and will not cover.
The financial considerations in this issue are almost as complicated as the political and ethical ones. Those in favor of “Obamacare” argue that regulating the health care industry will help stabilize the economy. The idea is that a regulated health care system will create new jobs in the health care industry, take pressure off of employers to provide for their employees (and thus free up more finances to hire more employees), and create new oppurtunities in the economy that cannot exist in the current system (for example, by allowing small businesses to be more competitive since they don’t have to worry about paying health care to their employees). Opponents to universal health care state that setting up a universal system will add billions of dollars to the national debt, raise taxes to cover the deficit, and virtually destroy the private health care market, an industry that makes billions of dollars in profit every year.
So, as you can see, health care is not just “one issue,” it’s a massive, multi-faceted subject that spans virtually every aspect of our economy, our politics, our government, even the very way we define ourselves as Americans. So the next time you see news about the ongoing health care reform, or hear some political talking head spouting his opinion and trying to sell it as fact, maybe you can better understand just how important an issue this really is.
