President-Elect Donald Trump’s nomination of U.S. Rep. Tom Price to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services can be read as a diagnosis that the deeply unpopular Obamacare law may well be considered terminally ill at this point.
That’s politics. The voters have spoken. What remains as ever before is the dizzyingly complex – and costly – conundrum of providing basic, decent healthcare access for all Americans.
It is a flesh-and-blood problem, as much as it is a think tank-type of policy debate. We should never forget that people can, do and will suffer — or needlessly die — if this nation makes the wrong decisions on healthcare.
Price, the Roswell Republican, has long been an energetic foe of the Affordable Care Act. He has also been critical of Medicare and Medicaid as currently constituted. To his credit, unlike some GOP’ers who were content merely to chant “repeal and replace,” Price has consistently pushed his own, conservative legislation that would supplant Obamacare.
With a solid Republican majority now in both chambers of Congress and Trump’s ascendancy, Price and kindred spirits are in striking range of dumping the ACA.
As their prescription for its replacement begins to be compounded, we’d urge that Price – a surgeon by training – and fellow conservatives consider deeply the human and ethical implications of the task now within their grasp.
We’d suggest that the doctors’ Hippocratic Oath is an excellent place to begin. A modern version reads, “I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.” It goes on to require of practitioners that, “I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.”
Besides being an awe-inspiring glimpse into what society asks of its physicians, those sentences are an excellent summation of the challenges facing the American way of healthcare.
Dismantling Obamacare will not miraculously heal what ails the U.S. medical apparatus, just as the ACA could not quickly repair all of its complex problems.
On this page, we’ve long tried to look past the politics and toward pragmatic, efficient and effective ways to improve the lot of more uninsured and under-insured people. Doing so is vital to both our state and national quality of life and economic development.
Leaders of some conservative states took that reality to heart in devising politically palatable and, at times innovative, ways to expand health care access. Their numbers include Arkansas, Arizona and Kentucky.
In an August 2015 editorial, we wrote that: “The states that have shown enough boldness and political courage to act have seen notable improvements in the statistics that count. In the first six months after Arkansas found a way to cover more of its uninsured, the state saw a 46.5 percent drop in hospital admissions of uninsured patients and a 35.5 percent decline in uninsured emergency room visits.
“Arkansas found a way to sign onto the system by devising a method of using public dollars to pay for private health insurance for the Medicaid-eligible. This ‘private option’ Medicaid expansion has opened health care access to more than 233,000 poor Arkansans. This Republican-produced take on Obamacare was approved by Washington and has proven politically palatable while achieving an admirable public policy goal.”
On this page, we have repeatedly urged Georgia’s elected leaders to find a similar path toward improving health care flaws, such as struggling rural hospitals, and shockingly high numbers of uninsured people here. The state’s business leaders, in an effort to create as attractive a climate for commerce as possible, had also joined in the quest for effective fixes in Georgia.
With the outcome of the national elections, all of the nation now faces a similar challenge. Really, the issue has expanded, given Republicans’ expressed desire to overhaul the widely popular Medicare and safety-net Medicaid programs as well.
Politics cannot overshadow the challenge we outlined on this page in 2015, in noting the 50th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare. “Finding a fiscally workable way to insure more of the poor is hard, politically risky work, but our state’s leaders should not flinch from the task. The experience of other states with the ACA shows we’re far from alone.
“Health care in America is a costly, complex, contradictory, bureaucratic and, yes, often-wasteful assemblage of many moving parts. In truth, that was the status quo long before the ACA was signed into law. It would remain the case if Obamacare were somehow, miraculously, repealed tomorrow.”
The GOP’s national election sweep doesn’t change any of that. It is now up to that party to move beyond rhetoric and begin to drive toward real solutions for the problems that the ACA was intended to solve.
The health and well-being of all Americans and our economy hangs in the balance until that happens.
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