As the Obama administration continues to face intense criticism over the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, now is an important time to remember the purpose behind health care reform.
There is no denying, though, that the president was wrong to misrepresent how implementation of the ACA would affect all consumers. "If you like your health care, you can keep it," he said. As a recent Buffalo News report indicated, that is not true for more than 137,000 Western New Yorkers.
And across the country, thousands of Americans have been receiving discontinuation notices for having policies that don't meet the requirements of the ACA.
President Obama was right to apologize to the American people on Thursday for his misleading claim. But he also needs to emphasize the asterisk that he should have placed on that claim - that these existing plans are being lost for an alternative of better plans.
The president having to explain himself about this is distracting many Americans from the real issue here. With that and the dysfunction of Healthcare.gov, the implementation of the new plan could not have gotten off to a worse start.
But, as leading political journalist Nate Silver explains in his book, The Signal and the Noise, "The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth."
In this case, the signal is that when left solely to the private market, over 40 million Americans were uninsured - many because they couldn't afford it and many because, due to preexisting conditions, being covered wasn't a profitable strategy for insurance corporations.
In 2009, Karen Tumulty wrote a cover story for Time magazine about her brother, Patrick. At age 54, he had a $9-an-hour job and paid monthly premiums for a policy with Assurant Health. When Patrick's kidneys began to fail, however, Assurant refused to pay his claims. Soon he had $14,000 worth of medical bills he had to pay.
For 99 percent of Americans, that kind of money can't just come out of pocket. And for Patrick Tumulty, who now had a preexisting condition, coverage was denied.
What critics of the new health law - who now have fodder for derision with the difficult rollout - lack when they scorn the changes, is an alternative for how to insure the uninsured.
They want government to stay out of the private market and let it do what it does. But supporters of the law believe that social justice requires government to provide assistance to those who find themselves on the lower edges of the economic precipice - and suffer because of it.
What opponents fail to recognize in their rhetoric is that when left to the private market, these inequalities are beneficial - because, as history has shown, vast inequalities increase efficiency and maximize profitability.
Those expressing outrage toward the law should recognize that the real problem is not that the website isn't working or that a small percentage of Americans are going to have to switch to a new policy; the real problem was the previous system that rendered millions in the dire position Tumulty was in.
None of this relieves President Obama of the mistake he made in not being fully forthright with the American people - even if in the interest of a noble cause.
Americans want consistency from their leaders - in both words and in deeds. It is a sign of character. And this would have been appropriate in the attempt to rectify the United States being the only wealthy democracy in the world whose government does not play a role in guaranteeing health insurance to all its citizens.
Those on the right are expressing more anger over a dysfunctional website and a broken promise (a real rarity in politics), but the question should be: Where is their anger for the 40 million like Tumulty?
email: editorial@ubspectrum.com
