ObamaCare Is Constitutional; Get Over It [View all]

June 2012

I live in Massachusetts. And here in Massachusetts, we live under the predecessor of ObamaCare — the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform Act, signed into law by former governor Mitt Romney in 2006. Under RomneyCare, as Rick Santorum supporters called it during the primaries, 98 percent of the state’s residents have affordable health insurance. Meanwhile, Massachusetts has not gone broke. It’s unemployment level is 6 percent this month, falling from 6.3 percent in April and better than the national average of 8.3 percent. No one is even considering overturning the 2006 law, sources from Blue Cross Blue Shield told me earlier this year. Mike Widmer, president of the non-partisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Association, told me the same thing when I was covering the New Hampshire primaries for Forbes. Companies are not going belly up because of RomneyCare. Private insurers operate in the state along side the non-profit health insurers like Harvard Pilgrim and Blue Cross Blue Shield. There have not been massive layoffs in the industry because of the law.

Over the five full fiscal years since the law’s enactment, the state has spent $91 million a year, well within the budgeted expectations. RomneyCare is not a budget buster, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation says.

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Romney happily signed the bill into law in 2006. He didn’t want to raise taxes on small businesses. The state legislature overruled him. Romney and the Democrats worked together on this law, despite the obstacles Romney put in their way. Their goals, however, were the same: let’s forget about healthcare costs for now and just make sure people have access to healthcare through affordable health insurance. The reason people don’t have access to healthcare is because they can’t afford health insurance. If you can’t afford health insurance, you don’t go to the doctors. In Massachusetts, everyone can afford health insurance. And with the mandate, there are more people on board. More people on policies. More people on policies means more money for insurers, but it also means more money for the state to dish out to the poor and self employed who qualify for state care under MassHealth. Still, no muni bond investors in the state of Mass worried about not receiving their coupon payments twice a year, or their principal back.

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My daughter has a mild form of epilepsy. If not for RomneyCare, I could never have afforded her treatments, month long at one point in 2010. She was taken care of at Boston Children’s Hospital. The Rolls Royce of Children’s Hospitals. That’s why it is expensive; it’s a Rolls. It’s the best. The question is…do you believe Americans should have access to the best, or even some modicum of good, or do you think that they should not simply because health insurance premiums are prohibitive? One way to make health insurance costs drop is to give health insurers access to more clients…guaranteed. If that’s socialism, it’s not much different than the state-support of capitalism that we have seen in the U.S. and worldwide since Ayn Rand wrote “Atlas Shrugged”.

Another note…”Atlas Shrugged”…is fiction. We are dealing with reality.

Scotus, Obamacare~ Upheld!



http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2012/06/29/obamacare-is-constitutional-get-over-it/

BOG