蘑菇视频

Apr 7, 2014 4 min read

Have you heard the news? Obamacare has been replaced by something called The Affordable Care Act.

Thanks to their exuberant disinclination to willingly accept anything with President Obama’s name attached to it, Republicans are having to go back to their “doomsday” drawing boards.

The word “Obamacare” only scares Republicans, it seems. They’re going to have to leave that word alone. Millions of Americans are now set to benefit from their brand new health care plans. Many already have.

Republicans, who’ve spent their time in Congress since the law was signed, find themselves caught in snares of their own trap. They’ve been fighting against a law that seven million-plus Americans feel will benefit them.

Those people had heard about those (non-existent) death panels; they’d seen Republicans vote 50 times to gut the law; they’d witnessed a government shutdown designed to halt it in its tracks; they’d heard the daily Fox News horror stories; and they’d witnessed a failed Republican presidential campaign that set as its centerpiece the dismantling of Obamacare. None of those things mattered to people who feared they’d face bankruptcy to repair a hangnail.

Now, thanks to that health care plan, formerly known as Obamacare, Republicans in Congress can even line up for low-cost brain transplants. That would be a good thing.

It didn’t have to go this way. When healthcare.gov was unveiled back in October, it was reported that only six people managed to enroll on the first day. Everybody, including Democrats, thought it had been a mighty shaky start.

Republicans, hoping and feeling that nobody would ever be able to enroll, fanned out across the airwaves. They were having a blast, blasting Obama, the website and government-run anything. Acting as if they sincerely cared that people couldn’t sign-up, Republicans even, hilariously, convened congressional hearings to try to discover what had gone wrong.

But the website got fixed. People slowly trickled to it, and many were surprised that they could, indeed, get affordable health care coverage, despite all of those dire predictions they’d been hearing about.

It must’ve been troubling for Republicans to see all of those people around the country line up to sign-up on the final enrollment day.

I haven’t checked, but I’ve heard that every pharmacy near Capitol Hill ran out of painkillers.

But for some right-wingers, the fight still hasn’t ended. To them, 7.1 million Americans really haven’t signed up. That the Obama administration has simply overstated its case.

“The estimate is one to one-and-a-half million of these people were uninsured before. The whole idea was insuring the uninsured. So, that’s going to leave about 40 million uninsured. And for that, we have to cancel 6 million policies?” said Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer.

He’s obviously been privy to numbers that nobody else knows. Especially since the LA Times has completely different estimates.

“As the law’s initial enrollment period closes, at least 9.5 million previously uninsured people have gained coverage. Some have done so through marketplaces created by the law, some through other private insurance and others through Medicaid, which has expanded under the law in about half the states,” it said in a March 30 report.

The LA Times estimates were based on “state and federal enrollment reports, surveys and interviews with insurance executives and government officials nationwide.”

Krauthammer was speaking off the cuff.

Republicans will soon discover that millions of Americans who’re benefiting from a health care plan with the word “Obama” attached to it is still beneficial.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who staged that silly government shutdown in the interest of getting rid of Obamacare, has already learned his lesson.

He staged an informal survey on his Facebook page — “Quick poll: Obamacare was signed into law four years ago yesterday. Are you better off now than you were then?”

He was flooded with resounded “yes” replies.

“Yes, very much — both because the new benefits in the ACA will be saving me quite a bit of money and because I got one of the good jobs created by the stimulus,” was one of them.

Bravo!

Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net