I signed up for ObamaCare. There, I said it. I’m out of the closet. As a freelance writer, I qualified for a tax credit on the federal exchange, and that tax credit can be applied to reduce one’s monthly premium.
So does this make me a leech on honest hardworking taxpayers? That’s already been said—and by friendly relatives no less. On the flip side, do I now have an obligation to say that the Affordable Care Act is a wonderful thing?
Let’s address the first point first, since it’s what cuts closest to the bone. Does getting a tax credit for health insurance make one a “taker”, to use the current conservative paradigm of “makers and takers.”
That’s a reasonable point. After all, if you start with your basic tax rate as the obligation a person has for paying for the government in a civil society, than any special reduction in that rate could be seen as “taking.”
But if we’re going to make that point, then it has to apply across the board and let’s start with a couple tax breaks that will hit close to home with a lot of people—mortgage interest and children. Now I don’t own a home and I don’t have kids, but I support the tax breaks, both of which are significant, that others get in these two areas. Why? Because I believe home ownership and children are good things—not just for those that have them, but for society as a whole.
Those who claim these deductions probably don’t think of themselves as “takers”—and neither do I—but if you’re going to call me a “taker” for having a tax break on health insurance, then you’ve certainly opened up the discussion to go down that road.
What about the flip side? Am I now obligated to say my opposition to ObamaCare was completely misguided? I suppose if you think I should reduce serious questions of national policy to simply being about whatever benefits me at a given point, then possibly. But I try not to have such a narrow view of the national interest.
Sorry, I don’t mean to come off overly pious when I say that, but I also know a friend who buys health insurance independently and is just outside (by a few thousand dollars) the threshold for getting the tax credit. People like that are getting whipsawed and we can’t pretend they don’t exist either.
Furthermore, it wasn’t as though as I was an apologist for the old system of health insurance. I recall posting on Facebook, probably around 2009, that asking me to care whether the insurance industry or the government ran health care was like asking me to care whether the Colombo Family or the Gambino Family ran the mafia.
In this analogy I’m akin to a bookmaker on the street who knows he’s kicking a percentage upstairs regardless of who’s in charge. Just tell me what I have to pay and where to send it. If I happen to benefit by how the mob wars play out at a given point in time, so be it, but don’t tell me there’s a grand moral principle at stake.
The fact of the matter I was, to put it bluntly, getting screwed by the old system. My premiums were rated up—drastically—because I had seen a therapist to discuss a failing marriage and it classified me a mental health risk. I guess if I would have talked to my parish priest, it was fine, but going to a therapist was a bridge to far for the insurance industry.
My case is just one of the insurance industry’s many failings in this regard, and one of the least serious. They declined people with pre-existing conditions and made coverage unaffordable. They made maternity coverage expensive--I recall when I sold health insurance back in the mid-1990s and sole proprietors having to do without maternity, even if they were going to have kids, because the rider was too expensive.
And the reality is that Republicans did very little (if anything) to speak out against this. At the grass-roots, most every Republican I know freely acknowledged the insurance industry was screwing things up, but when it came to elected officials, it was Democrats who consistently took the lead on the topic. Including—in fact most prominently—Democrats that I wouldn’t vote for in a million years, ranging from the late Teddy Kennedy to Nancy Pelosi to President Obama himself.
The Republican Party in general and the conservative movement in particular have a lot they can offer the health care debate, in bringing free market principles to bear in reducing costs. But to date, their political class has been uninterested in making those arguments, except as a defensive measure, and focused their attention on lamenting those lazy 47 percenters. A group of which I am one. And by the same standards that apply to me, apparently a lot of other people are as well.
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