The only way forward on health care involves bipartisan leadership
In the political fight over health care, neither team is winning. The Affordable Care Act isn’t perfect and never was. The replacement plans that have emerged in the House and Senate are hideously cruel.
So all that has been proven through years of fierce battles is that neither Democrats nor Republicans have found the right answer, and that the hyperpartisan way in which they’re attacking the issue will never work in crafting responsible and effective policy.
It’s an infuriating situation, because the problems are all repairable. If Congress and the Trump administration would adopt a solutions-based approach and abandon the political grandstanding that has come to define the national health care “debate,” they could create a historic legacy by building on the gains of the ACA and making health care more affordable and available to Americans.
Getting there, though, requires two things. One, Republicans have got to drop their nonstop talk of repealing the ACA and scuttle their insane proposals to replace it with plans that would leave millions upon millions of Americans without coverage while allowing the wealthy to pocket millions upon millions more dollars via deep tax cuts.
Two, Democrats should concentrate more on posing solutions and working across the aisle to form responsible policy instead of merely blasting the plans coming out of the House and Senate and plotting to fill more seats with Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections.
It no longer matters who’s responsible for the problems with the ACA — the fact that it hasn’t brought down health care costs significantly, that insurers are dropping out of individual markets, that premiums are on the rise. The Republicans will say the measure was fatally flawed from the beginning, the Democrats will say the repeal attempts have created turmoil and knocked the initiative off-track.
We say: “Who cares? Fix it!”
Granted, that’s a complicated task, as Donald Trump famously discovered only after taking office.
But the solution lies in improving the ACA, not dismantling it and throwing the nation’s income-distribution scale even more grossly out of whack. For instance, although health care costs haven’t gone down under the ACA, they’ve increased at a relatively modest rate in recent years. That’s a step in the right direction, as cost containment is at the heart of the issue. Today, Americans on average pay about twice as much for health care as residents in other affluent countries.
Medicaid expansion also should be protected. That’s been proven in Nevada, where it has led to a decrease of about 50 percent in the uninsured rate.
Those are merely a couple of corner- stones of any fix, but the bigger point is that time and experience have proven there’s no effective way forward except a bipartisan approach.
Lawmakers who embrace that reality have a chance to show true leadership and make a difference for Americans, not only those living today but for future generations.
On the flipside, politicians who continue to treat health care in a partisan way — a hot-button topic that is sure to gin up their bases and deepen the divisions between Americans — don’t deserve the offices they hold.
For the nation’s leaders, playing the game as usual is madness. It’s time for both sides to focus on the interests of all voters, not just those who support them.