Supreme Court hearings this week perhaps brought home more details concerning the "Affordable Care Act, affectionately termed: "ObamaCare," than any previous event. Myth and reality are now so interwoven within all levels of healthcare discussion that it seems impossible to extricate anything resembling fact from the tangled mass laid before us this week. Will overturning the health mandate actually liberate the resulting plan from a complexity it needn't have suffered in the first place? Will a "single payer" option again emerge is the preferable solution, now that interstate commerce has proved an unsuitable carrier? Or, will we attempt a return to the old status quo.
Return to what we had even a year ago is both impossible and undesirable. Regardless of perceived shortcomings in the compromise Affordable Care Act, it's benefits to millions of Americans far outweigh its detriments. Legislation achieved through compromise may never be perfect, yet compromise is the necessary vehicle of our democratic process. All we can do in the case of any legislation is get going with the best thing possible and then improve as we go.
Such is the situation here. Overturning the present law, declaring it to be "unconstitutional" simply because it may not neatly fit into previous confines of federal interstate commerce regulation, will only result in an indefinite period of healthcare chaos in which lawmakers strive to enact limited measures to address the most grievous needs. The result will be a patchwork at best, incapable of supplying substantial healthcare overall and restricted in it ability to address specific circumstances.
No, none of us will get exactly all we want from from the Affordable Care Act, but each and every person will at least have access to affordable care. That in itself represents a long sought victory.
