By Daniel Rigney
I know I speak for several other Democrats when I say we owe Mitt Romney and the conservative Heritage Foundation an apology. RepubliCare, HeritageCare, RomneyCare, ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act. Call it what you will. It’s working better than that wretched system it replaced, which left millions uninsured and denied millions more needed treatments on the grounds that their pre-existing conditions didn’t make insurance company owners rich enough.
A grateful nation now knows that RepubliCare has exceeded its goals for enrolling uninsured Americans after the program got off to a slow and glitchy start last fall.
But now there’s even better news from Massachusetts, where a study just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that RomneyCare in the Bay State has saved more than 800 lives per year. Extrapolating that result to RepubliCare nationwide, the Affordable Care Act is expected to save more than 24,000 lives each year. This is cause for wild celebration.
Mitt Romney, the Heritage Foundation and the GOP have covered themselves in glory today, thanks to the policy innovations of compassionate conservatives. Yet several Republican governors, including, Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and Rick Scott of Florida, strangely refuse to bask in their own party’s moral success by refusing to implement Medicaid provisions in the Affordable Care Act.
Reluctant governors, enough of this moral modesty! Come forward now and save an estimated 6,000 lives a year by extending Medicaid coverage under the provisions of the law. And remember: Many of these survivors and their friends and loved ones will vote in coming elections -- not that this should weigh in your principled ethical calculus.
To be frank, my own preference would have been for a Canadian-style single payer system, a kind of Medicare-for-all. But that wasn’t going to happen politically. If I have to choose between RepubliCare and WeDon’tCare, I’ll take the former any day.
WeDon'tCare, as you may know, is the Tea Party alternative to RepubliCare.
So thank you again, Mitt, and all hail to you self-effacing donors in the shadows who fund the Heritage Foundation. If it weren’t for your compassionate conservatism, thousands of people who are alive today would have been dead and buried by now. Yours be the glory for birthing the Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama, who now seems to be getting most of the credit for saving lives in his role as our national lifeguard.
Sometimes life isn’t fair.
Danagram
;] … changing the world one word at a time
I know I speak for several other Democrats when I say we owe Mitt Romney and the conservative Heritage Foundation an apology. RepubliCare, HeritageCare, RomneyCare, ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act. Call it what you will. It’s working better than that wretched system it replaced, which left millions uninsured and denied millions more needed treatments on the grounds that their pre-existing conditions didn’t make insurance company owners rich enough.
A grateful nation now knows that RepubliCare has exceeded its goals for enrolling uninsured Americans after the program got off to a slow and glitchy start last fall.
But now there’s even better news from Massachusetts, where a study just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that RomneyCare in the Bay State has saved more than 800 lives per year. Extrapolating that result to RepubliCare nationwide, the Affordable Care Act is expected to save more than 24,000 lives each year. This is cause for wild celebration.
Mitt Romney, the Heritage Foundation and the GOP have covered themselves in glory today, thanks to the policy innovations of compassionate conservatives. Yet several Republican governors, including, Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and Rick Scott of Florida, strangely refuse to bask in their own party’s moral success by refusing to implement Medicaid provisions in the Affordable Care Act.
Reluctant governors, enough of this moral modesty! Come forward now and save an estimated 6,000 lives a year by extending Medicaid coverage under the provisions of the law. And remember: Many of these survivors and their friends and loved ones will vote in coming elections -- not that this should weigh in your principled ethical calculus.
To be frank, my own preference would have been for a Canadian-style single payer system, a kind of Medicare-for-all. But that wasn’t going to happen politically. If I have to choose between RepubliCare and WeDon’tCare, I’ll take the former any day.
WeDon'tCare, as you may know, is the Tea Party alternative to RepubliCare.
So thank you again, Mitt, and all hail to you self-effacing donors in the shadows who fund the Heritage Foundation. If it weren’t for your compassionate conservatism, thousands of people who are alive today would have been dead and buried by now. Yours be the glory for birthing the Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama, who now seems to be getting most of the credit for saving lives in his role as our national lifeguard.
Sometimes life isn’t fair.
Danagram
;] … changing the world one word at a time
No comments:
Post a Comment