Five years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, the metrics point to success: the percentage of Americans who are uninsured has fallen dramatically, the runaway growth of healthcare costs has slowed, family budgets are more secure and, most importantly, lives are being saved. At an event on Wednesday marking the ACA’s fifth anniversary, Pres. Obama addressed these and the ACA’s other successes — and even pointed out the fundamental paradox of the GOP’s contrived opposition to it: The ACA was based on their own plan.
“[The] Affordable Care Act pretty much was their plan before I adopted it,” the president said, “based on conservative, market-based principles developed by the Heritage Foundation and supported by Republicans in Congress, and deployed by a guy named Mitt Romney in Massachusetts to great effect. If they want to take credit for this law, they can. I’m happy to share it.”
Republicans deserve credit for how deftly they managed to flip from inventors of the individual mandate to the system’s most virulent opponents. It is a masterfully executed con job perhaps second only to the “marketing” of their pretexts for invading Iraq in 2003. Resourced by unlimited money from the Koch brothers and their ilk and with a constant cannonade of propaganda from Fox and right-wing media, the American right magically transformed the private-insurance based plan developed at uber-conservative Heritage into a big-government takeover of healthcare and socialized medicine.
Facts are stubborn things, and the truth will out, eventually. The fact is, as the president said, the model for the Affordable Care Act was Romneycare, the same individual-mandate-based system then-Gov. Mitt Romney deployed in Massachusetts in 2004. Three years later, Romney proudly asserted that the individual mandate was the brainchild of the ultra right-wing Heritage Foundation:
ROMNEY: [The] Heritage Foundation worked with us and was at the celebration of the signing — the Heritage Foundation, as you know, a quintessentially conservative group, recognized that the principles of free enterprise and personal responsibility were at work. You know, I’m proud to talk about what we did. We did not need to raise taxes. We did not need to have the government take over healthcare. Instead we rely on private market dynamics to get people in our state insured and for individuals to finally take responsibility for some portion of their healthcare rather than expecting government to give ‘em a free ride.
The fact that, five years after the ACA passed, the GOP’s lies and spin about it are alive and well is testimony to the fact that while they have consistently proved they can’t govern, no one does big propaganda better or more successfully than the American right and the Republican Party.
Watch a clip of the president’s remarks on the ACA’s fifth anniversary — transcript follows:
Transcript via the White House:
But the bottom line is this for the American people: The Affordable Care Act, this law, is saving money for families and for businesses. This law is also saving lives — lives that touch all of us. It’s working despite countless attempts to repeal, undermine, defund, and defame this law.
It’s not the “job-killer” that critics have warned about for five years. When this law was passed, our businesses began the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record: 60 straight months, five straight years, 12 million new jobs.
It’s not the fiscal disaster critics warned about for five years. Health care prices are rising at the slowest rate in nearly 50 years, which has helped cut our deficit by two-thirds since I took office. Before the ACA, health care was the single biggest driver driving up our projected deficits. Today, health care is the single biggest factor driving those projections down.
I mean, we have been promised a lot of things these past five years that didn’t turn out to be the case: death panels, doom. A serious alternative from Republicans in Congress.
The budget they introduced last week would literally double the number of the uninsured in America. And in their defense, there are two reasons why coming up with their own alternative has proven to be difficult.
First, it’s because the Affordable Care Act pretty much was their plan before I adopted it — based on conservative, market-based principles developed by the Heritage Foundation and supported by Republicans in Congress, and deployed by a guy named Mitt Romney in Massachusetts to great effect. If they want to take credit for this law, they can. I’m happy to share it.
And second, it’s because health reform is really hard and the people here who are in the trenches know that. Good people from both parties have tried and failed to get it done for 100 years, because every public policy has some trade-offs, especially when it affects one-sixth of the American economy and applies to the very personal needs of every individual American.
The ACA works. Yes, it was a Republican plan and because of that it passed rather than single payer which should be the next health care law to pass. Unfortunately, it will likely be a while. At the time of passage of the ACA there were too many Blue Dog Democrats who ate at the corporate trough to pass single payer, but I do recall it was getting very close to the filibuster proof number in the Senate before the rug was pulled out from under it by the Obama team. So yes, the ACA, a’la Romneycare is the Obama selected plan and he owns it. It isn’t the plan per se, but the ownership that Republicans hate. Such is life. Nixon was a Republican and a crook too but I respect him for his establishment of the EPA and that he did, finally, get us out of Vietnam. See, I don’t reflexively hate everything Republicans do. Somethings make sense.