Taking away medical care for millions of Americans is not the right thing. Paying millions to politicians to ensure that healthcare will end for Americans is morally deplorable.
affordable care act
The ACA is no longer just an idea. It is how millions of people access health care—and the Supreme Court stands poised to gut it.
All the reform possible
It’s easy to imagine health-care reform that does more than the ACA. It's almost impossible to see it getting enacted, as Steven Brill's book reminds us.
In October 2013, a program entitled “Health Care from the Pulpit” was introduced by Enroll America, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to increase enrollment in services provided by the Affordable Care Act among the previously uninsured. They intend to bring churches of different faiths together to “be engaged in the education and outreach efforts around the Affordable Care Act open enrollment period.” Programs like “Health Care from the Pulpit” have existed for centuries and in a number of national contexts. The greatest example occurred during the spread of the smallpox vaccine in France in the early 19th century.
“Many religious liberty accommodations will have absolutely no effect on the rights of third parties. Those are easier cases.”
In politics, meeting in the middle is often a useful and necessary thing. But it isn’t itself an adequate ethical yardstick.
For decades, community health clinics existed on the margins of the health-care world. Now they're critical to the system.
Several GOP governors have made plans to go along with Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid. This is very good news.
In case you missed it last Friday, the Obama administration quietly issued a proposed update to regulations coming out of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as "Obamacare." The verbiage is a bit dense, but here's the upshot: the ACA requires health plans to provide contraceptive coverage to all insured members. Some religious organizations and even a few for-profit companies objected to this requirement, citing religious beliefs.
Most people know only about the ACA's consumer-focused elements. Faith-based care providers are preparing for the law's other provisions as well.
With the Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court, Americans have yet another chance to learn about what the law actually contains.
The first is wonky fun; the second is just the regular kind.
Jonathan Chait is exactly right about the unspoken conservative position on health-care reform: Opponents of the law have endlessly invoked “socialism.” Nothing in the Affordable Care Act or any part of President Obama’s challenges the basic dynamics of market capitalism. All sides accept that some of us should continue to enjoy vastly greater comforts and pleasures than others. If you don’t work as hard as Mitt Romney has, or were born less smart, or to worse parents, or enjoyed worse schools, or invested your skills in an industry that collapsed, or suffered any other misfortune, then you will be punished for this. Your television may be low-definition, or you might not be able to heat or cool your home as comfortably as you would like; you may clothe your children in discarded garments from the Salvation Army.