If enacting the PPACA means that there is now a right to healthcare in the United States, it’s not because most Americans believe that it’s the government’s responsibility that everybody have healthcare insurance:
PRINCETON, NJ — The 56% of U.S. adults who now say it is not the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage continues to reflect a record high. Prior to 2009, a clear majority of Americans consistently had said the government should take responsibility for ensuring that all Americans have healthcare.
or that the PPACA’s popularity has convinced people that healthcare is a right. Indeed, not only do a majority of Americans believe that the government has no responsibilty to ensure that everybody has healthcare insurance, the percentage of Republicans, independents, and Democrats who believe that the government does not have that responsibility has increased since 2009. The trend is downward.
People in different countries believe in different things. In Russia people are uncomfortable with differences in incomes that people here aren’t. In France a broadly-defined “equality” is a high value in a way it isn’t here.
IMO some of the reasonable objectives of the PPACA have popular support. For example, I strongly suspect that most people see rescission, arbitrary cancellation of insurance, as unjust. A law banning rescission other than in cases of fraud could have been written in a paragraph.
“A law banning rescission other than in cases of fraud could have been written in a paragraph.”
Or working on portability. The essential point I’ve been making for years.
This law was about ideology, control, voter capture, taxation and redistribution, not dealing with a very few legitimate structural issues. No sane person constructs or advocates a ginormous and overly complicated contraption only Rube Goldberg could appreciate when a simple Leggo set would do.
re rescission: Tom Maguire pointed out that after all of the Congressional hearings, California liberalized its rescission statute, dropping rescission of healthcare policies to almost nil.
This morning there is a story that Obama is opposing hospital efforts to sign (and pay for) certain chronically ill patients to insurance because it will skew the exchanges. The right to healthcare insurance must be made available to the healthy first.
This post continues the bad habit of confusing “health care” with “healthcare insurance.” Of course, people have a “right” to healthcare, food and sex, but nobody talks of a right to food insurance or sex insurance.
Indeed, healthcare insurance might well improve access to health care, but at the cost of denying access to food, sex and other things, like beer, that a young man might value more than perinatal care for the breeders.
“IMO some of the reasonable objectives of the PPACA have popular support. For example, I strongly suspect that most people see rescission, arbitrary cancellation of insurance, as unjust. A law banning rescission other than in cases of fraud could have been written in a paragraph.”
The “reasonable objectives” of the PPACA were enacted right away to snare people into becoming hooked and supportive of the law. It wasn’t until it’s ominous side effects bloomed, did more people get the gist of where this HC law was really taking them.