Listening to the Sunday morning political talk shows this week gave me some insight on Obamacare that I had known about but hadn't really thought about until hearing again how the House wants to defund Obamacare or shutdown the government...yet again. I'm not sure what the Republicans seek to gain by doing this, but using Obamacare as a "bargaining chip" is pretty self-defeating, in my opinion.
Let's take recent polls of Obamacare. True, the polls that I've looked at show that Americans still aren't sold on the idea of the Affordable Care Act. One poll indicated only 39% of Americans support Obamacare, while 51% are adamantly against it. Another stated that 45% think it will have a "negative impact on the nation's healthcare system rather than a positive one." Those numbers frankly shocked me. One respondent, whom I saw quoted in many of the articles I read, was a Republican-leaning female from North Carolina whose biggest concern was that the bill has "death panels in there, and they're going to decide whether people are going to get treatment or not." Wow. First of all, there are no death panels anywhere in the bill. The only provision that could even be considered close to a death panel is the one requiring Medicare to pay for end-of-life counseling, which was taken out of the bill altogether in 2010. I'm not sure how someone can even make a statement like that, unless what they read (or more likely watch) led them to that misconception.
The term "death panels," I found out, was coined by Sarah Palin in 2009 regarding the healthcare bill, and was quickly shot down by those who actually fact check, instead of spout whatever they feel to get people to agree with them, whether it's true or not. She was referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) which makes recommendations of cost-savings to the Secretary of Health and Human Services if costs of Medicare raise too much. This, in no way, is a death panel, or even close to it. It's a provision that, in my opinion, is important in order to make the system work better and provides an entity that would keep the system in check, so to speak.
(This is an incomplete excerpt written a week before the Oct 1 rollout of ACA and before the shutdown. Now, a month later it's old news so I didn't feel like finishing it, but felt compelled to post what I had anyway.)
