Why I love Obamacare

As are most Americans, I am saddened when we listen to our political leaders argue to the point of brinkmanship. Our country was founded upon strong Judeo-Christian values, such as our sense of right and wrong, truth is sacred, human life is a gift of God, individual responsibility, courage, compassion, servant leadership, helping the poor, and others.

Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, is an extreme example of an issue based on Judeo-Christian values that is falsely defined by a lack of exercising those same values.

As a small business owner with 30 employees, I have been struggling to find affordable health care for my employees since 2009 when our company was founded. My employees were able to buy healthcare individually for significantly less than it would cost our company for the same coverage.

The main reason we have not been able to find affordable care was because of the structure of the current system. Health care costs were determined both by how many people were in the buying group and the relative health of its members. A large corporation with many employees can use its buying power to offer lower-cost medical insurance. Small corporations would not get a discount for buying power, and price would depend on the overall health of its employees. Small companies could face large increases in their health care costs if they hired an unhealthy employee.

For an individual seeking health care, getting coverage from a large corporation was optimal since the costs were lower. If a person tried to get health coverage on their own, the cost was directly related to their health, and they were often unable to deduct the cost from their income taxes.

If an individual were a large health risk, the cost of insurance could be extremely expensive or not offered at any price. Their medical problems might then go untreated, resulting in further deterioration or possibly death. The current system does allow the uninsured to visit emergency rooms for treatment, but that is often only a temporary stopgap.

The problem for the people without the ability to acquire affordable health care to be heard in our current political environment was that they had no unified face. There was no one group identity for people to rally around to solve the problem.

With Obamacare, the current system will be changed dramatically. No longer can anyone ask anything except age, sex and whether you smoke on the application for healthcare. Everyone will be covered with equal costs based on the answers to these three questions. Employers will be forced to provide healthcare if they have more than 50 employees. All individuals will be required to acquire healthcare.

We have yet to see the actual results of Obamacare. There will undoubtedly be unintended consequences, but the natural result of this new system is that healthy people will pay more and unhealthy people will pay less under Obamacare compared to the old system. Apparently, this is causing many people to be irate, even though our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values which include helping those who need help.

Do we let those people with treatable cancer just die without treatment because they cannot afford healthcare? The beneficiaries of Obamacare are painted by the opponents of Obamacare as lazy people who don’t work hard enough or as undocumented immigrants mooching off of our hard-earned dollars. Painting people like this is simply untrue. In fact, the people who cannot afford healthcare in the old system are a cross-section of our country. Many of us have friends and neighbors who cannot afford healthcare in the current system.

Obamacare is not a great system. There are certainly flaws, and there will be further hiccups. The inefficiency of government-managed systems is legendary worldwide; the United States being no exception.

Our president managed to get Obamacare passed into law. It was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court .