Kyle Cupp
This opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal by former Senator Phil Gramm nicely illustrates the indifference to the needs of the poor you find in some prominent critics of the Affordable Care Act–critics who are in a position to attack the law. The title of the article, “A Simple Cure for ObamaCare: Freedom,” concisely summarizes Gramm’s take: the healthcare reform law is a disease that needs to be cured.
Gramm urges Republicans to get behind a feasible alternative to ObamaCare and proposes what he calls “the freedom option”: “Every American should have the right to decide not to participate in ObamaCare: If you like ObamaCare and its subsidies, you can keep it. If you don’t, you are free to buy the health insurance that fits your needs.” To be sure, this proposal would do nothing to help Americans who cannot afford the costs of health coverage. That’s not the intent of the proposal because that’s not where Gramm’s moral concern lies:
The opposition would come solely from those who understand that ObamaCare is built on coercion—and that unless young, healthy Americans are forced into the program to be exploited with above-market insurance rates, the subsidies will prove unaffordable. That will be an exceedingly difficult case to make to the public.
By extinguishing coercion, the freedom option would put ObamaCare on the path to extinction. Without the ability to exploit the young and healthy, the Affordable Care Act will collapse under its own funding weight, all but guaranteeing a 2017 revision of the entire law.
Gramm is clear: his desire is to destroy the Affordable Care Act and revise the entire thing. Somehow. Maybe. Who can say what will happen? He’s also up front about whom he thinks are the disadvantaged: young, healthy Americans of means who are required under the law to help cover the costs of those who need subsidies.
He expresses no concern for the hardship and harm his proposal would cause. That people now covered wouldn’t have access to the social good of healthcare seems to be of no consequence to him. Their losses would present no moral problem. His values are elsewhere. What’s remarkably immoral to Gramm is prosperous young and healthy Americans being coerced into helping the needy. The well-to-do have his heart. The poor not so much. “Exploitation” matters to him when it happens to the former, not so much to the latter. “The alternative will almost certainly be a long or a short path to capitulation,” he concludes. Because capitulation is apparently the worst possible outcome in all this.
ObamaCare is deeply flawed legislation. The results of the act have moved us closer to a just healthcare system, but we’re not there yet. Even people with coverage are still in the position of having to figure the financial costs into their decisions to seek care for themselves and their children. High costs still incline people away from seeking the care they might need. There are better ways to run a healthcare system, but the right response to this fact is not, as Gramm proposes, to destroy the Affordable Care Act come what may.
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