CWT #179: ‘Obamacare' (Affordable Care Act), 'Death Panels' and FEMA Camps

The basic text of what I say here:

The individual mandate was actually something favored by The Heritage Foundation, as well as Republicans like Mitt Romney (who people seem to forget was the Republican candidate for President).
So it's not like the individual mandate was just a tax penalty that was used by Democrats or liberals or leftists. Of course, right now that tax penalty basically does not even exist because it's been set at ZERO (at least from what I understand)

So why was it important that SOMETHING got passed?

Before the ACA passed, insurance companies already had all the customers they could handle and were happy to let the market decide which was the most profitable plan and which was the least profitable.

There was a little problem, though: The market decided that some people don't need health insurance coverage if they couldn't afford it. Plus, of course, consumers don't have whether their injury or sickness is profitable to a corporation. They just want the problem to be fixed.

So, contrary to what many conservatives want, it was not likely that the flailing embarrassment of an approach to healthcare would remain completely “frozen in time”. The wannabe experts crafted their plan, and like an exotic variation on the Jurassic Park scientists who extracted dinosaur blood from a mosquito trapped in sap, our intrepid healthcare policy professionals found our parasitic system, which was stuck in the compromising honeytrap of greed and power, and siphoned out some of that dinosaur-system DNA, promising to inject some of that sweet and sour dino system blood into our individualistic arms, so we can better bond with our dinosaur-parasite corporations and get better outcomes, all while being threatened with fines if we don't pay money for the gift of being compelled to get those injections

(Well, okay, using that analogy risks having me sound like an anti-vaxer or something, and I might have lost some of you here, but the point is, they tried to sell ACA as something cool and innovative when, in reality, it was just them trying to cling to a healthcare system that left insurance companies in control, which is far different from how other, in some ways often better, healthcare system work globally).

Obama took some heat over this, and understandably so, but also often not for the right reasons. Rather than criticizing the basic flaws of having a corporate system, the right-wingers frothed at the mouth over Obamacare being part of a plot to institute sinister "death panels" designed to kill your grandma, or maybe that old rickety bitch would end up in one of those FEMA camps (bring some s'mores, we're going camping!)

There was one legit critique, though:
Obama wanted the public to believe that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” That was not quite true. Some people lost their coverage, even if new people gained. It wasn't necessarily the end of the world for most people, but
Politifact named “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” the Lie of the Year for 2013.

Still: All the conservative pundits who claimed Obamacare went well beyond the limits of the US Constitution had that semi-debunked when the Supreme Court itself actually upheld Obamacare!...