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Eiko Ojala
Now that Republicans in Congress appear to have at least temporarily abandoned their crusade against the Affordable Care Act, it seems like a good time for lawmakers to come up with plans to fulfill their promises to increase access to health care and to lower costs.
Let’s stipulate up front that congressional leaders and President Trump are unlikely to lead that effort, given that they narrowly failed to take health insurance away from millions of people. This conversation would need to be led by senators who have committed to a bipartisan approach, and by state governments, some of which have already begun to take action.
Change might not come soon enough for the 29 million people without health insurance or the many millions who struggle to afford high premiums, deductibles and other health costs. But even the A.C.A., the 2010 health law also known as Obamacare, was the product of many years of spadework and was based on a Massachusetts health reform bill signed into law by Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006.
Obamacare has helped 20 million people gain access to insurance, and it appears to have helped slow the growth in health care costs. But even former President Barack Obama has said that there is still work to be done. The United States spends much more on medical care than other rich countries, like Britain, Australia and the Netherlands, according to a recent Commonwealth Fund report, yet its citizens live shorter lives and suffer from more illnesses and injuries than people in other industrialized nations.
One option that appears to have gained support among the public is a single-payer system, which proponents like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren call “Medicare for All.” A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found in June that 53 percent of Americans favor such a system. This was up from 46 percent, according to an average of seven polls conducted in 2008 and 2009. But moving to a single-payer system from one dominated by employer-paid health coverage would be a big leap, and in any case the political climate is clearly not ready for it. Many Democratic voters as well as party leaders like Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer have been reluctant to embrace the idea, and, no surprise, most Republican voters and lawmakers oppose it.
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/opinion/sunday/obamacare-universal-health-coverage.html
