Gov. Nathan Deal and his fellow Republicans still don’t want to expand Medicaid in Georgia because, you know, Obamacare. They just want to “experiment” a little with it, even sneaking a tiny provision into the state budget to allow them the leeway to do so.
Put another way, they want to get just a little bit pregnant, while publicly pretending that they’re still pure as the virgin snow. This is their halting, reluctant way of acknowledging the reality that Obamacare is working, that the arguments against it are losing force, and that they’ve been on the wrong side of a very important debate.
Because by almost any metric that you care to cite, Obamacare is a major success. The latest confirmation came from a report released this week by the highly respected, thoroughly nonpolitical RAND Corp. According to its data, 16.9 million previously uninsured Americans now have health insurance as a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.
That’s 16.9 million Americans with much-enhanced access to the health-care system. That’s 16.9 million Americans who can now pay their medical bills, with much less worry about being bankrupted by an illness or injury. It also means a lot of lives saved, and improved quality of life improved for many others. In fact, the latest research suggests that Obamacare is now saving some 24,000 American lives each and every year. In states that have accepted its assistance, it has also preserved an often rickety health-care-delivery system in rural areas and high-poverty urban areas.
And the predictions of doom?
Obamacare hasn’t destroyed the economy — the jobless rate has dropped to 5.4 percent and we’ve added 5.4 million jobs in two years. It also hasn’t led to a huge jump in health-care costs — in 2013, the last year for which we have data, health-care spending rose just 3.6 percent, well below the historic average. And it hasn’t forced companies to drop health insurance for their employees, as many critics predicted. Instead, the RAND study found that between September 2013 and February 2015, an additional 8 million Americans gained health insurance through their employer.
Admittedly, critics were right about one thing: They predicted that cost projections by the Congressional Budget Office used by policymakers to defend the program would prove spectacularly wrong, and that prediction came true. Back in March 2010, the CBO projected that Obamacare would cost $710 billion between 2015 and 2019. The latest CBO cost projection for those years is now $506 billion, a 29 percent decrease from initial projections.
Back in 2010, Nancy Pelosi famously noted that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy,” a statement that was instantly twisted into something it was not.
What Pelosi meant was that given all the inflammatory political rhetoric about the bill, Americans would have to see the program actually implemented before they could judge whether it was the disaster that critics had predicted, or whether it represented the significant advance that its supporters promised.
Five years later, the fog of controversy is lifting. And Obamacare is a major success, by any measure that you care to use.
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