The Affordable Care Act has now had several weeks of implementation to prove its worth and to display its shortcomings. Over 3 million people have currently signed up for healthcare coverage through the exchange, numbers that are more or less on par with the administrations projections.
Given that the first two months of the law’s existence were mired in the turmoil of a non-functioning website, the latest numbers are surprisingly high. So why are there still members of the conservative party who continue to claim that the law is an abject failure?
Granted, the law is gaining traction amongst the ideological holdouts on the right, even here in Wyoming, where bills to expand Medicaid have recently been pushed forward, but the overall tone of politicians on the right towards the law is overwhelmingly negative.
The law, simply put, doesn’t do anything all that drastic. The law doesn’t strip away the most basic human rights of the citizens of the U.S., nor does it force people of certain racial ethnicities to use separate bathrooms (wouldn’t that be weird?) All the law does, at its most basic foundational level, is allow a federally sponsored program to grant healthcare coverage to basically everyone. The process and details of it are obviously much more complex, but the overall ideology behind it is not.
It is exactly the ideology of “Obamacare” that is generally under attack from opposition of the law. The fact that it’s “Socialism” or “unfairly hurts small businesses” is constantly brought into the public debate.
The term “Socialism” is by far one of the most misunderstood terms in America. It’s equated with Communism and loss of individual rights, but in fact is an ideological and economic structure used to preserve the rights of citizens, rather than corporations.
For whatever reason, anything that is viewed to be anti-capitalist or corporate interest seems to evoke withering contempt from the average U.S. citizen. But why? No one seems to be able to outline exactly what it is about capitalism that makes it the end all, be all economic structure that they claim it to be.
In fact, if you read an actual history book that looks at the beginnings of this country, you will see example after example of the ways in which capitalism was used as a means to basically subjugate the majority of the population of the U.S. In the era that many people view as our country’s “Golden Age of Industrialism/Capitalism” there were more labor union strikes and pushes for a Populist party in government than any other time in American history.
Get that? When American citizens were literally breaking their backs to earn a living, in the archetypal way many senior citizens will state is the “True American Way”, they were also striking for a more social economic system. Fast forward to 2014 and the claim that a politician is a socialist is almost enough to end their career.
Are we still so entrenched in Cold War-esqe dogma that anything other than capitalism is some sort of “Commie” evil? The spite filled rhetoric that fills our political stage has to play a role in why the ACA is still intensely criticized, but that’s not enough to explain the full picture.
There is a deep streak of distrust for the government that holds strong in the minds of many people in this country. Ironically, many government failures that ushered in this era of mistrust for political authority stemmed from actions taken by administrations of, to put it bluntly, the more conservative persuasion.
Is the problem with the ACA simply what Fox News tells us it is? Or is there a historical precedent that naturally drives people to deeply distrust the idea of government giving you health coverage? Either way, the law isn’t going away soon, so Conservatives either need to get involved with it, in an effort to make it “better” by their standards, or at least stay out of its way.
