Whatever idyllic implementation of the Affordable Care Act President Obama envisioned, estimations that the comprehensive health insurance law’s rollout has been disastrous are not farfetched. Many observers haggle over the logistical and administrative faults made by the President, and rightly so. But here is a more political thought: Obamacare is a tough sell to most Americans because it aims to change a long-rooted status quo in the financial relationship between those who have good health care and those who do not.
The basis of why some see Obamacare as such a noble upheaval is the relatively agreed-upon ideal that no person in a country as rich as the United States should go without health services or face severe financial burden if they become very ill. Most can agree on this, yet it is the reconciliation of many people’s healthcare insecurity that begins to slowly teeter the equilibrium of the current balance in the sharing of wealth.
It was around the time when Americans were turned loose to shop on the new health exchanges mandated by Obamacare that many people’s frustration began to erupt over what “affordable care for all” would actually mean for them. Thousands of people who already had health insurance received letters in the mail informing them that their insurance plans would be terminated on December 31st because their plan no longer complied with the regulations outlined in the Affordable Care Act. Apparently these people had plans that, to the law’s authors, were skimpy and insufficient. While it was hard enough for these Americans to accept that their coverage had been yanked while it was simultaneously impossible to purchase a plan on the healthcare exchanges due to technical problems with the healthcare.gov website, it was harder to swallow that they had been told just over a year before by a campaigning Barack Obama that if they liked their health care plan, they could keep it–period.
Long before websites were created and plans were cancelled, when the overhaul of America’s health insurance system was first being debated, the country’s two major political parties placed bets on the tide of public opinion over health care reform. Republicans appealed to those so-called “insiders” of the current system, whose health care situation of present was favorable and adequate, and who understood what government-subsidized health care would mean for their own pockets—because what cannot be ignored about the Obamacare system is that some will pay more to get less. The Republicans bet that these insiders would want to keep the status quo and would ultimately prevail, catapulting the Republicans back into power.
The Democratic Party and their leader understood the dangers of losing the support of this insider share of the healthcare-consuming populace, but they hoped to gain the support of the millions of people on the “b-level” plans that the Democrats categorized as inadequate, and predicted that these “outsiders” would funnel into the market for the plans offering government subsidies and assistance sold via the Obamacare health exchanges. And while this is all well in theory, it turned out that many owners of these plans do not want to change their healthcare. What President Obama had failed to realize was that those he was categorizing as “outsiders” thought themselves to the contrary. In other words, they liked their current insurance. Erroneously assuming otherwise, the President assured the nation countless times, in a way that was perhaps too politically gratuitous to pass up, that if people liked their current plans, they could keep them. He must really have been thinking, “Who would pass up the plans available on the health exchanges marketplace for their current plans?” Self-declared healthcare insiders, that’s who.
Without a functioning website for those people whose plans have been dropped to purchase new healthcare, the winner of the bets waged by both political parties on the willingness – or reluctance – of people to participate in the Obamacare giving-wheel remains to be seen. But surely, never before has the wellbeing of a single website been so crucial to the shifting balance of political power underlying a country’s attempt at so-called health care reform. While President Obama may have won the legislative battle, at least for the time being, he has yet to adequately convince the nation’s hearts and minds of the merits of the new system he created. And that may ultimately lose him, and the Democrats, the bet.