Monday, November 12, 2012

Some Thoughts on "Obamacare"


This was taken from a post about Papa John's reaction to Obamacare.  I made this comment after some brief research and reflection about the issue at hand.

I think a key thing to remember about "Obamacare" is that it was passed by Congress (Who we elected to run our government and set policy for us), withstood the test in the supreme court (With conservative Chief Justice Roberts siding in favor of the law), and has survived 30 attempts (As of 7/9/12) at repeal starting two weeks after the Republicans regained House majority after the 2010 election. We live in the most powerful country in the world, shouldn't we have the best healthcare for every person that lives in this country and makes it what it is? Since the US was founded, we've enacted laws and policies to protect our citizens. Unions were created to protect factory workers from abuse and unsafe working conditions. Laws relating to fair and equal treatment despite differences in sex or race gave everyone a chance to succeed. We created oversight of corporations to prevent them from forming monopolies that would send citizens into a new breed of sharecropping. I say "we" throughout all this because we are a representative democracy. We have elected our government to act on our behalf. If we don't like the way things are being done, we elect someone else or we convince our representative to feel differently about the issue. The problem many of the States and companies like Papa John's is facing is that they had hoped Romney would win and get the law repealed. As an aside, it shocks me that they think he would have been able to do much since every attempt in the House to repeal it failed. Since these States and companies were hoping the law would be repealed they failed to plan ahead and prepare for the different clauses of the law that take affect over time. Now everyone is scrambling to make up for lost time, hiring freezes and layoffs are happening because they didn't create a plan to deal with the consequences of the law. If they'd been ready, this wouldn't be happening.