Trumpcare Means Leaving the Poor and Sick to Fend for Themselves
Aug 4, 2018 01:54:43 #
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trumpcare-leaves-the-poor-and-sick-to-fend-for-themselves.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-t
Yesterday, the Trump administration unveiled plans to allow insurers to skim healthy customers out of the insurance pool by offering skimpy plans that last for up to three years. The legally dubious maneuver is the crowning touch on the administration’s persistent efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Conservative intellectuals are justifiably ecstatic. “Wednesday’s rule came to be because dedicated people within the Trump administration worked hard to push federal policy in a libertarian direction,” exults Cato Institute scholar and onetime author of the “Anti-Universal Coverage Club Manifesto” Michael Cannon. Indeed, Trump’s attacks on Obamacare, taken together as a sum, provide a fair picture of the American right’s unique, social Darwinist philosophy of health-care policy.
Many people are either too poor or too sick to afford access to medical care. In every democracy in the world save the United States, a broad social consensus accepts the need to subsidize care for those people. This includes the conservative parties in those countries. Among right-of-center parties in the developed world, only the Republicans are so committed to anti-government dogma as to oppose measures to subsidize medical care for those who can’t afford it themselves.
But whenever Democrats have attempted to expand access to health care, Republican leaders have generally declined to present themselves as principled opponents of universal health care. Instead, they have promised they could accomplish the same goal in a better, cheaper fashion, without any of the painful trade-offs in the existing Democratic-authored proposals. No such plan ever emerged, in part because Obamacare was the most market-friendly way to accomplish the bare minimum objectives of any humanitarian health-care reform. The only space to Obamacare’s right involved punishing the poor and sick with medical and financial deprivation.
Yesterday, the Trump administration unveiled plans to allow insurers to skim healthy customers out of the insurance pool by offering skimpy plans that last for up to three years. The legally dubious maneuver is the crowning touch on the administration’s persistent efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Conservative intellectuals are justifiably ecstatic. “Wednesday’s rule came to be because dedicated people within the Trump administration worked hard to push federal policy in a libertarian direction,” exults Cato Institute scholar and onetime author of the “Anti-Universal Coverage Club Manifesto” Michael Cannon. Indeed, Trump’s attacks on Obamacare, taken together as a sum, provide a fair picture of the American right’s unique, social Darwinist philosophy of health-care policy.
Many people are either too poor or too sick to afford access to medical care. In every democracy in the world save the United States, a broad social consensus accepts the need to subsidize care for those people. This includes the conservative parties in those countries. Among right-of-center parties in the developed world, only the Republicans are so committed to anti-government dogma as to oppose measures to subsidize medical care for those who can’t afford it themselves.
But whenever Democrats have attempted to expand access to health care, Republican leaders have generally declined to present themselves as principled opponents of universal health care. Instead, they have promised they could accomplish the same goal in a better, cheaper fashion, without any of the painful trade-offs in the existing Democratic-authored proposals. No such plan ever emerged, in part because Obamacare was the most market-friendly way to accomplish the bare minimum objectives of any humanitarian health-care reform. The only space to Obamacare’s right involved punishing the poor and sick with medical and financial deprivation.
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