Let's remember what this law actually does: It broadens the risk pool by requiring everyone to buy insurance (or pay a fine); it bans insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions or cutting off your benefits when you get sick; it subsidizes coverage for those in the lower and middle class; it forces large employers to offer coverage and permits smaller employers to buy lower-cost plans in state-administered insurance exchanges; it closes the so-called doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription drug benefit; it pays for all of the above primarily with taxes on the wealthy and fees levied against big insurers. That's it. No killing grandma. No government credit card for Planned Parenthood. None of that nonsense. In the end, none of the dire predictions the right wing has made will come to pass.
Many Americans, including those who took to the streets to protest the supposed communist usurpation of the American dream, will hardly notice the changes around them, because they already have access to health care, and their lives won't change all that much.
The threat will subside. And when it does, the fears of the outraged thousands who stood on the National Mall last weekend, decrying "Obamacare," waving Gadsden flags and shouting — among the assorted epithets — for lawmakers to "kill the bill," will evaporate into the ether.
It's happened before: In 1961, Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the modern GOP, famously warned that passing Medicare would mean "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Nearly a half-century later, Republicans lined up to oppose health-care reform, decrying the fact that it cuts $500 billion from Medicare, albeit in overpayments to insurance companies.
click here for complete City Paper commentary by Jeffrey C. Billman