GOP Healthcare Plan

It appears that the long awaited repeal and replace Obamacare health care bill that was promised will not come to fruition in the near future.  It is truly a sad indicator of how partisan the politics of America has become that we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having a flawed national healthcare program in place as acknowledged by both parties, most Americans, and the majority of health care providers and insurance companies, but do not have the stomach, guts, leadership or whatever other word you might want to use, to fix it.

As far back as I can remember, our collective approach to the problem of providing a reasonable cost for the majority of Americans to pay for their moderate health care costs, while addressing the needs of the minority of Americans who cannot afford to pay for their above average health care costs, has ranged from assuming the heath insurance industry would humanely balance their profit with the well being of their customers, to creating arbitrary affinity groups (through employment, union or other trade or age related membership) to increase the pool thereby spreading out the costs, to the truly horrific idea that sick people deserve to be sick due to their poor lifestyle choices or equally poor luck from the birth lottery.

Mixed in with these inadequate approaches, the specter of America's love affair with individualism and capitalism pretends that health care is a commodity just like a car or a house, so that those with the most money will naturally be able to purchase the best health care, and those with the least will have to make do with the economy version.

And, we eschew the national health care model of most of the rest of the "civilized" world which creates a national pool of customers to lessen the costs of individual sickness or group trends of disease, by asking everyone to pay a little more in taxes.  The fact that this bigger pool is really just an extension of the affinity groups we are using today, is lost in the angst created by those who use the S word (socialism) to belittle the universal health care model that addresses the real issue behind our debate: costs.

The good news is that we should recognize that in their lack of unity, the GOP has done a valuable service to America in their inability to create a better plan.  It is imperative that the liberal media and pundits try to avoid gloating over the fact that they had 8 years to come up with a new plan and failed miserably, and focus on the fact that for whatever reason, concerns over the reduction of insured Americans, concerns over the sky rocketing costs which would have been passed along to the states, or even concerns that the GOP repeal bill did not go far enough to remove government from the heath care morass, whatever the reason, we must praise our GOP controlled legislature for not following through on their repeal and replace mantra by voting for just any new piece of legislation.  I applaud them for finally realizing that it is easy to criticize, but much harder to govern.

Will they merely repeal?  I would like to think that the answer is no, even if only because they are afraid of losing their job when they next run for office.

And who knows, perhaps the loss of the last 8 years, which might have afforded the chance to amend the ACA so that the needs of the truly sick, and those with limited access to health care insurance could have been addressed while balancing the costs to the aforementioned chronically ill along with the majority of Americans who face average and less than average health care needs, will spur us to find common ground across the water cooler, and common ground across the political aisle.