In 2010, NCR welcomed the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which has come to be known as Obamacare. “We think the health care reforms now enacted into law are strong steps toward a greater good … the largest expansion of the nation’s safety social net in 45 years -- including health coverage for more than 30 million Americans -- is a monumental achievement worthy of praise.”
We lamented that the U.S. bishops didn’t share this enthusiastic welcome, after all, comprehensive health care coverage is something the bishops had endorsed for nearly a hundred years.
NCR was equally praiseful in 2012 when the Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality the first time. “Standing behind any particular constitutional provision was the recognition that Congress and the president have the obligation to ‘promote the general welfare’ and that such general welfare is not promoted by a system that left almost 50 million Americans without affordable access to health care,” we said then.
However complicated the intricate policy aspects of the Affordable Care Act, however confusing the actuarial tables, however conflicting the legal principles at stake, the moral issue is as clear as day: Every industrialized country in the world has found a better fix to the issue of health care than has the U.S.
Only the U.S. is so beholden to powerful, entrenched corporate and partisan interests that we have failed to achieve universal access to health care. It is time for the nation to find the political will to defend the principles that defined the Affordable Care Act.
Affordable care for all. Access for all. Lower costs for all. That is the recipe for a decent society and any continued obstruction is properly called indecent.
While the law is once again before the Supreme Court, today, we have more evidence that Obamacare is working: 16 Million Fewer Uninsured Thanks To Obamacare.
“Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act almost five years ago, about 16.4 million uninsured people have gained health coverage -- the largest reduction in the uninsured in four decades," Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in a written statement accompanying a new report from the department.
More cause for celebration.
