The GOP's Worst Nightmare -- Obamacare Works

(The cartoon above is by Walt Handelsman in Newsday.)

The cartoon above is a couple of years old, but it paints a pretty accurate picture of the Republican response to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). It didn't matter that Obamacare was originally an idea proposed by Republican senators, who were afraid President Clinton might try to pass a single-payer health insurance system -- they opposed it because President Obama accepted it (and they had already decided they would oppose everything the president tried to do, even if it was something proposed by their own party).

They did their best to turn the public against Obamacare -- telling about "death panels" that didn't exist, saying people wouldn't sign up for it, saying it would be disastrous for hospitals and health care providers, and claiming it would cost many jobs in the health care industry (among other untruths). And they desperately tried to repeal it more than 50 times. They couldn't get it repealed, and none of those nightmare scenarios occurred -- but the biggest nightmare for those Republican officials has occurred. Obamacare is working. It has improved heal care in this country.

The charts below are just more examples of how wrong those Republicans were. The first chart is from the Gallup Poll (taken between July 1st and September 30th of a random national sample of 44,998 adults. because of the extremely large sample, the margin of error is only 1 point. It shows that the percentage of uninsured Americans has gone down substantially among the general public, among all age groups, and in all regions of the country (even where Medicaid was not expanded, as in the South).

The second chart, from a national survey of hospitals by the Colorado Hospital Association, shows that hospitals have really benefitted from Obamacare (at least in the states where Medicaid was expanded). In those states, the average cost for each hospital for charity care (uncompensated care) has dropped from $2.8 million a year to only $1.9 million (a drop of about $0.9 million per hospital). That's money saved -- costs they don't have to pass on to other consumers (or taxpayers).

The third chart show the jobs created each year in the health care industry. Obviously, Obamacare has not been the job-costing disaster predicted by the Republicans. The industry keeps adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each year.

I'm not saying Obamacare is perfect and has solved all of our health care problems. I still think we could do better by going to a single-payer system (like Medicare, only for everyone). But it is an undeniable fact now that Obamacare has been a big improvement over what we had before -- and that is making the Republicans, who made such dire claims about it, look very foolish.