It can't Be that good if the Government has to spend money to sell it!

I came across yet another excuse from my conservative denier friends about the Affordable Care Act.

This one dealt, incredibly, with the amounts of money the government is spending to implement the Act.

It was pointed out, with no tongue in cheek, that if the Act was any good, the government would not be spending all the money it is to "sell" it.

I did not bother to look up the approximately trillion dollars anti-ACA proponents have spent over the past five years to discredit the ACA.

Remember 2010?  Who can forget when Congress recessed for the summer, and went home to face an unexpected and well funded "rage" by the ascending Tea Party over the ACA?   It was later discovered that the Koch brothers, and other well heeled interests (including the health insurance lobby) had poured money into the Tea Parties, to create the uproar.

And sure enough, support of the ACA dropped, Republicans were elected to office and it became almost impossible to pass the Act.

Only through some incredible effort was the ACA passed, with the vital "public option", that would have made it even more successful than it will be, discarded.

Studies are now showing, the more the public finds out about the ACA, the more they like it.  And that the deniers hate; and fear!

They hate the fact that a black President is getting credit for the ACA.  He has even given in to calling the ACA "Obamacare", a derisive term cooked up by the right wing's disinformation machine; throwing their argument back in their faces.

But the debate continues, over a change, that has already been approved.

The danger here, lies in the Supreme Court upholding of the Act, that  left the expansion of Medicaid up to the states.

Red state governors took their cue from this mistake, and are making it very difficult on the poor to take full advantage of the ACA.  After all, the singular purpose of the ACA was to extend medical insurance to the approximately 50 million poor, who have no insurance at all.

I can see a migration from Red states to Blue, of the poor, who cannot get coverage in their Red states, because of the actions of partisan conservative legislatures opposing the ACA.

This will only add to the unfairness and misery for the poor; as usual, they get the short end of the stick.

The same complaint was made about Social Security, which took over five years to phase in, and that was done during WWII.  Conservatives, who still hate the singularly most successful social welfare law in our history, complained that the Act was hindering the war effort.

Medicare: same thing; Ronald Reagan famously declared, through a well funded denier campaign, that Medicare would end capitalism in the United States.  And, since the Vietnam War occurred during Medicare's implementation, I remember conservatives complaining that the Act should be stopped because it too hindered the war effort.

Every one of these landmark social welfare acts has been resisted for generations by the conservative movement.   And ironically, much  of the philosophy of these laws actually were born in conservatism.

Otto Van Bismarck, not exactly a liberal socialist,  first came up with the idea of Social Security in Prussian Germany!   Social Security is a public insurance based pension program, based on the conservative ideas of insurance and risk.  Individuals contribute for a lifetime into a fund, that in fact, provides for the retirement of current retirees.  It was, and is, a conservative idea!

Medicare is simply an extension of Social Security, adding Health Care to the  pension benefits of Social Security insurance.

Most people do not have the will, nor the capacity to save long term for their retirement needs.  The financial collapse of 2007 proved that, the middle class had invested and borrowed on their homes, as the sole provider of pension support aside from Social Security.  When their homes declined in value, the equity loans middle class families had taken out on their homes, suddenly were reduced to nothing, leading to widespread foreclosures, and a steep decline in personal wealth; especially in wealth leading to retirement.   As a consequence, baby boomers are left with Social Security as their sole pension source.

As a consequence, baby boomers today must work until they die.  And, those who can retire, must wait until Medicare.

The ACA will change that hopefully, giving "early retirees" a bridge from retirement to Medicare eligibility.

Finally, there is the pesky Massachusetts's  example.  The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney's claim to fame, what his successful implementation of an ACA type health insurance plan in his home state.  Romney had brokered a deal with the Massachusetts' Democratic dominated legislature for a public mandate driven health insurance plan which is what the ACA is  patterned after.  In fact, the core elements of the two laws are practically identical.

And Romney could not run on his accomplishment, because the Republicans had decided to fall on their swords to scuttle the ACA.  He failed precisely because he could not tout his singular highest accomplishment..

"It can't be that good...."  The unbelievable denseness of that statement given the trillion or so dollars opponents of the ACA are still spending is unreal.

Meanwhile, the Health "Care" Industry in the United States continues, and will continue I fear, to be a monolith, sucking the very economic vitality out of our country, no matter where you stand on the ACA.

The fact is we need even more radical reform than the ACA requires, implementing the kind of governmental controls many European countries did decades ago, on an out of control health care monopoly.

In short we need the public option, which will morph into Medicare for all, with strict government controls, to finally bring an end to our economy killing health care crisis.
And THAT, my conservative friends, is where we very well may will wind up, thanks to your endless denying of the benefits of the ACA.

Maybe President Reagan will be proven right, capitalism in health care may eventually end, killed by the conservative movement's inability to adopt the very social welfare concepts they created!