The political theater of the absurd that House Republicans staged Tuesday and Wednesday before voting on repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 made a mockery of logic and facts, of the actual benefits of the law already put in place, and of those to be implemented by 2014. House Republicans’ simplistic, 28-line repeal bill, to be sure, will get nowhere in the Senate, so it will not be passed before the 2012 presidential election, if ever. But that is hardly the point.
Republicans did not stage this show in the hope of actually repealing the health care reform bill in the near future. Rather, their interest is only in the political symbolism against reform and the electoral gains they hope this deceitful initiative will spawn in 2012.
Reasonable voters can only hope the benefits of reform will cancel out the GOP’s anti-reform propaganda and lies by then. For voters interested in the facts, there already is clear and ample evidence of the accumulating benefits of reform, and there are larger benefits to come.
The Affordable Health Care Act has already made substantial inroads in curbing the medical insurance industry’s gross abuses of ordinary working-class Americans through tactics that fracture and undermine the original intent of broad-based health insurance.
The Act, for example, has outlawed the use of pre-existing conditions to deny insurance coverage for children. It has banned the insurance industry’s scheme of canceling insurance when customers get too sick, and it has banned insurers’ lifetime caps on medical coverage. By 2014, annual caps on coverage, and denials of insurance to adults with pre-existing conditions will also be banned.