By Robert P. Bomboy
JULY 30, 2017
A long time
ago, in 1710, a famous German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, wrestling with
the question of why evil exists, said this is the best of all possible worlds.
In his own
time and ever since, the idea that ours is the "best of all possible
worlds" has caught a lot of pushback. From Voltaire, also a famous
philosopher, to Bertram Russell, legions of wise men have undercut Leibniz:
Voltaire sniffed that the world contains an amount of suffering too great to
justify such optimism; Russell, like Mr. Spock, simply said it was
illogical, Captain.
In the Senate of the United States,
the Republican Majority Leader, that astonishing thinker Mitch McConnell,
laughs at the very idea. Working in the dark, with no one to help him, he
actually put together his own version of Frankenstein's monster, the Republican
Unaffordable Care Act that thrashed about in the Senate halls until this week.
McConnell is not concerned about the best of all possible worlds. To the very
end, he didn't care if his abominable
creation was evil.
It can certainly be argued that the
people who gave birth to Obamacare were seeking to do something good for the
American people.
If you look back before 2010 when
Obamacare became law, millions of Americans at that time were living, dying,
and suffering in the cruel world that Voltaire described. People
routinely got kicked off their health insurance for getting pregnant, having a
pre-existing condition, or losing their jobs. And then no one would sell them
health insurance. That happened to someone I know. Many people had bad health
insurance plans that imposed all kinds of cruel restrictions. Sixty million
Americans had no health insurance at all; and, as a result, many people lost
their homes, went bankrupt, and suffered other hardships trying to pay for the
treatment of their illnesses. We were one of the very few industrialized
nations that had no basic guarantee of health care.
Since 2010, twenty million
Americans have bought health insurance coverage under Obamacare. The number of
America's uninsured dropped to a record low 8.6 percent
last year. That's something good. Put that up against the lies and bitter
propaganda that Donald Trump Twitters out every day and screams at his rallies
to the very people who will suffer if his Frankenstein had passed in Congress.
Many people don't know that
Obamacare made good changes in every aspect of our healthcare.
A lot of our readers are retired,
like me. Did you know that, under Obamacare, 57 million of us on Medicare now
pay less for our Medicare coverage and for our prescription drugs. For us,
Obamacare has meant lower premiums, deductibles, and cost-sharing in Medicare
and is slowly eliminating the infamous "donut hole" in our prescription-drug
coverage. Typical Medicare patients pay $700 less in premiums and cost-sharing
than they did before Obamacare. And since Obamacare came to be, in 2010, at
least 11 million Medicare patients have saved, on average, more than $2,100 per
person on prescription drugs. We don't see it. We don't connect it to
Obamacare. But it's the truth.
Many people get free mammograms,
colonoscopies, and cholesterol tests under Obamacare. And people with
pre-existing conditions, like the hardworking family I know, can no longer be
turned away.
There's a lot more if you look back
at my previous columns on the free blog of saveaffordablecare.blogspot.com. It
may not be the best of all possible worlds, but the evil that was implicit in
Mitch McConnell's Frankenstein Act was shocking by comparison.
An objective analysis, by the Congressional
Budget Office, of the six Frankenstein plans made the evil clear:
· All
six would have torn health insurance away from millions of Americans - the
health insurance that Obamacare had permitted them to buy - (five of the six
plans that went through the House of Representatives and the Senate would have
cut off 20 million people; the sixth proposed plan would have cut off 30
million).
· All
six Republican proposals made deep cuts in Medicaid (which helps not only the
poor but also middle-class people in nursing homes and thousands upon thousands
fighting drug addiction). The partial-repeal bill in the Senate that was
killed, finally, during this past week would have stripped 19 million men,
women, and children off Medicaid by cutting $842 million from the Medicaid
program.
Back
in the 1980's a rock group called Iron Maiden, cribbing Shakespeare, sang,
"The evil that men do lives on and on."
Three
Republican heroes who voted with the Democrats at two o'clock in the morning -
two women and a dying veteran - (along with thousands and thousands of American
citizens) kept that from happening.
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