Today is the day many have been dreading — the first day of the enrollment process for the Affordable Care Act. The hallmark legislation of the Obama Administration takes its first steps as we speak.
Because of the legislation’s sweeping scope and controversial nature, it is difficult to parse through all of the noise that comes out of D.C. and the media regarding Obamacare.
But here is what we know so far:
First, the Affordable Care Act is not ready for primetime.
This should not surprise anyone simply due to the fact that the mantra of center-left coalition which passed the bill was, as Nancy Pelosi put it, “pass (Obamacare) so that you can find out what is in it.” They created a nightmare bill that includes pages of regulation and bureaucratic inefficiency.
Proof the bill is not ready for primetime lies in the sheer amount of delays the bill has racked up. The administration delayed two key provisions of the law in July, delayed the pocket caps in August and delayed the enrollment of most small-business exchanges scheduled to open today.
A more damning indictment of the bill is that the administration has not verified Obamacare’s security claims.
Second, President Barack Obama misled the public on the promises of Obamacare.
Obama promised the American people, “If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
Contrary to the reassuring words of Obama, conservative activist Michelle Malkin recently found herself without her health care.
Malkin wrote, “Last week, our family received notice from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Colorado that we can no longer keep the plan we like because of ‘changes from health care reform’… The letter informed us that ‘to meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.’”
The administration has stated premiums would be lower than what the budget experts estimated. However, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research said the administration “cherry picked the data in order to highlight the fact that people of low income will benefit under the law, but people of middle income will not,” and added that the partial subsidy that the average American gets, “won’t be enough to overcome the dramatic increase in the cost of insurance.”
Also, businesses are dropping overages and reducing hours due to the law.
Third and finally, the Right needs to reevaluate and refocus.
Having failed to repeal and defund Obamacare, the GOP does not know how to proceed. The party needs to realize the lack of a viable alternative to Obamacare hurts them in the health care debate. The party also needs to realize lambasting Obamacare is a great campaign strategy, but promising that the law can be completely defunded is dishonest.
For better or worse, Washington is now controlled by grassroots activists. And for better or worse, the leader of the grassroots activists for the right is Sen. Ted Cruz.
While I prefer to have a political party that has different approaches to policy issues, the GOP needs to keep public infighting to a minimum. Then the party needs to refocus its energy on the upcoming budget battles and combat runaway entitlement programs. I concede that the state of our health care even before Obamacare was bad, but I’d argue that adding more regulation, confusion and bureaucracy to the problem will not fix it.
And I do not believe Obama passed the bill because he wants to destroy America. I believe it is a flawed — perhaps even tragically flawed — attempt to fix a bad health care system by virtue of the president’s big government — again flawed — beliefs. If you thought passing, litigating and attempting to defund the law was a bumpy ride, fasten your seatbelts for its implementation.
Michael Beato is a UF economics sophomore. His column runs on Tuesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 10/1/2013 under the headline "What we’ve learned in the health care debate so far"
