First of all, I know you can't take anything anyone says at face value. There are always going to be prejudices and biases in politics, whether you are listening to a politician speak, reading a newspaper, watching the news, reading my blog...anything that is a secondary source is going to be skewed at least a little to embellish or demonize a point. When dealing with topics such as these I like to go straight to the source, in this case the original text of the bill. Unfortunately this is a notoriously long and complex document (a few thousand pages), and I simply haven't had the time to give it more than a cursory glance. This is the main reason why I cannot give a solid argument one way or another--lack of necessary information. I only wish others, too, would do some good research before making free with their claims and judgments.
Here's what I've gathered thus far: Republicans and some Democrats are against this bill. Here are their main reasons:
- The cost ($940 billion over 10 years)
- The loophole that allows federal dollars to fund abortions
- Various horror stories of how poorly universal health care works in other countries
- The principle: more government means more inefficiency and fewer liberties
- Expanded health care to 32 million uninsured Americans
- Greater regulation means increased affordability and reliability
- The principle: this legislation was over 100 years in the making, and Obama's top prize
I'm glad this bill was passed. Of all the industrialized democracies, America has one of the highest percentages of uninsured people, yet we are still paying almost twice as much as everyone else per capita on health. Talk about inefficiency...we are suffering from one of the most financially inefficient systems out of all the industrialized democracies.
Here's a great video summing up the argument against health care reform:
I would like to address a few things that she mentions. She makes a very powerful statement, saying "they ignore the fact that it is our children who will pay for their greed." My initial response to this is: who's being greedy? I fail to see how this bill relates to any personal greed amongst her colleagues. But that's not really a huge deal. It's probably just because, as I've said, I didn't read the whole text yet.
She mentions that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are insolvent and are going to crush us under their weight. This is probably true, but to compare these three things to this current legislation is kind of like comparing apples and oranges. Social Security is currently a mess. It was a saving grace when it was first introduced, though, and was done with the right ideas in mind. The problem is that the government failed to adapt Social Security to the changes and challenges it faced--namely the huge population bubble in the Baby Boomer generation, as illustrated by this chart:
Our government is designed to be able to adapt to the changes and challenges of our times. Social Security was something it was very slow in reacting to, and we will likely pay the price. We can only hope that any challenges that will arise with this bill will be addressed and remedied as we see fit. No law we pass will be set in stone. It can always be changed if it doesn't work.
Marsha Blackburn views the federal government's control of things such as health care and student loans as chilling, and I guess this is simply an ideological difference that we have, which makes it awfully hard to change. But let's do a case study with Germany: it has guaranteed health care, retirement, and college funding for all citizens, making it one of the most developed social democracies in the world. The government pays for you to go to school from kindergarten through grad school, pays for your health care, and pays for your retirement. This helps give Germany a particularly notable statistic: 0% poverty. Yeah...no one in Germany lives below the poverty line, because the government works like it should and takes good care of its citizens. Even more impressive: Germany can offer this while only levying marginally higher taxes (3-5% more as a percentage of income) than the United States. This is because Germany has no standing army (other than for peacekeeping). We in the United States pick up the defense tab for Germany and other NATO nations by virtue of our $900 billion defense budget and our de facto "world police" status. All this socialism must be destroying the economy, right? Nope. Germany has one of the most productive economies on earth, leading the world in exports until China very recently surpassed them. Blackburn calls it chilling. I call it awesome.
While on the topic of ideologies, I can't help but make an aside regarding religion in politics. As I've been studying Catholic Social Thought this semester, I found it interesting that the official Catholic Church stance on this topic would be for universal health care. Pope John Paul II wrote in his social encyclical Laborem Exercens "The expenses involved in health care, especially in the case of accidents at work, demand that medical assistance should be easily available for workers, and that as far as possible it should be cheap or even free of charge." I know religion plays a large role in people's political leanings, and that the Catholic Church is notoriously associated with the Right. But I think that if you actually read official church doctrine on social issues, Catholic thought aligns precisely with the Democrats' platform on all issues not related to same-sex marriage and abortion. That's where that little loophole about abortion can make things kinda ugly. That alone will null a lot of people's support for the bill. Obama issued an eleventh-hour executive order to keep the status quo on abortion, but a lot of people on the Right are still skeptical. I think that the language creating the loophole will be the first to be changed in the bill. Obama and the Democrats can't afford to be responsible for the fiasco side effect of legalized abortion, and the executive order is pretty good evidence that abortions will not in fact be funded by taxes when all is said and done. It's far too risky.
Anyways, the really big issue that Blackburn is trying to drive home is the cost. The peculiar thing is that the Congressional Budget Office, a bipartisan group, projects that this bill, while costly, will actually reduce the overall deficit by some $143 billion. I suggest reading at least the first few sections of the Fiscal Year 2011 Budget for more information on how conscious the Obama Administration is about not adding to the national debt.
The curious thing about tax dollars is that they don't simply disappear into a vacuum every Spring when we file our taxes. That money is being kicked back into the economy through government purchases. The big thing is that taxes are meant to serve the common good of the people who pay them, not to be squandered or dumped in some politician or lobbyist's savings account somewhere.
My guess is that a lot of the doomsday predictions against this bill will never come to fruition. The passage of the bill probably will, however, hurt the Democrats at the polls come November, whether it is a net good or a net evil. I can see both sides to the coin, but I firmly believe that this legislation is a net good and a step in the right direction. While it's imperfect, I trust our government and our voters to perfect it over time, just as we always do (except for Social Security). But what do I know? I haven't read the text.
Want to know how this bill affects you? Here's a helpful illustration.
yeyeah dude
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