Are the Critics of ObamaCare being fair?

I promised myself when I started this blog that I would avoid being overtly political in my posts. This is an exception.

What follows is my response to a physician friend, a very Conservative individual, who continuously bombards me with emails attacking the Affordable Health Care Act and anything having to do with Obama. I finally got fed up and replied. By the way, he and I may argue but we are always civil to each other and wish to remain friends.

"Dear_______

I read your comments about the Affordable Care Act and, no surprise, disagree with you completely. Here's a different point of view.

I believe the media is totally distorting the reality of a marvelous (if imperfect) plan that would work quite well if people would just give it a chance. I lived through the same kind of nonsense attacks on Medicare in 1965 when it went through it's growing pains, and Bush's Rx plan was a nightmare at first that could have been subject to the same scrutiny if the democrats wanted to use it for political purposes. So did the Massachusetts plan which now works well but was a horror in the rollout. Romney should be ashamed of himself for running away from the single most important thing he did as Governor.. 

The so-called insurance that some people are now losing isn't worth the paper it was written on and one of the best benefits of the ACA will be getting rid of those phony insurance plans. In many cases where someone says they lost their coverage it turns out they are actually eligible for better coverage at subsidized rates. And they will know this as soon as the bugs are out of the website. Yes, the website rollout sucks, but it's just a website, not the plan which is loaded with benefits the public and the ratings-chasing media do not yet understand.

By the way, I have much more sympathy for 50,000,000 Americans who were totally uncovered but can now have protection against health care bankruptcy than I do for the temporarily discomforted and relatively few true hardship cases these anecdotes keep dramatizing. 

As you know, I have studied health systems all over the world and, at one point in my career, I was considered a a bit of an expert on it. I have worked my entire professional life trying to help get a universal health care program in America and am heartbroken at the lies that are successfully confusing the media and the public.  

If they succeed in destroying this market based program, I believe the next step will be a huge movement for a real government run single payer system, and I will be in the street advocating for it. I don't have that many years left in which to see this dream realized.

Your friend,

Bob"

I would encourage a civil dialogue on the subject on this blog but will not approve (and may delete) comments that don't meet that standard. Feel free to disagree but, if you do, tell us what you would do instead (if it became your responsibility) to protect the 50,000,000 uninsured and underinsured fellow Americans. But don't tell me you don't care about them. If that's your opinion, please keep it to yourself.

Robert Tell, Author,