THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

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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