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Editor’s note: This is a brief look at the impact of the Affordable Care Act on American lives.
OAKLAND, CA — The positive discourse in liberal political circles surrounding the Affordable Care Act (ACA, popularly called “Obamacare”) sharply contrasts with the increasingly negative impact of the law on many Americans. The ACA is part of the politics of austerity, designed to ration health care for everyone except the 1%. It leaves out too many people, shortchanges too many others, and does not recognize adequate health care as a human right. It also guarantees that even more public dollars go to shore up extraordinary private health industry profits. This public money would be better spent giving health care to those the ACA left out. Then the country could see how the economics of abundance—not austerity—would benefit everyone.
In Northern California, The Women’s Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) works with labor and the community to help the public see the problems with the ACA, which has been lauded as a progressive reform. The ACA is often attacked as government control when in reality it’s corporations taking over our government to profit from our illnesses.
WEAP’s “Train the Trainer” sessions are open to everyone in an effort to make policy education accessible. At a recent WEAP training, testimonials of poor care under the ACA were given. One problem is that the ACA pressures to increasingly privatize health care have destroyed old safety net systems like community clinics. People spoke of very limited choices where families can get care, of fewer clinics for special populations like battered women and the mentally ill, of bureaucratic barriers finding help for a special needs child, of rural populations having very limited access to health care.
One young woman said going from county care to private insurance under ACA is so expensive that she is better off paying the fine for not signing up. Another said her local pharmacy cut her off because MediCal (California’s Medicaid program) privatized her care to a corporation that decided “for business reasons” to drop her pharmacy. As WEAP director Ethel Long-Scott said, “just because you have health insurance doesn’t mean you have access to healthcare.”
Most of the $965 billion public dollars ACA allocates go directly to subsidize private insurance companies, according to OnLabor.org’s Jack Goldsmith. This increasing privatization of previously public programs shifts the focus from people to profit. The Affordable Care Act is just one example of privatization where corporations pocket profits at the expense of the people. The reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was also a highly privatized profit grab where recovery was slow and painful, and people were left indebted to corporations for years to come.
Healthcare needs to be refocused on the people, not on profit-making institutions, because the Human Right to healthcare requires putting people first, not profits. Nationalizing health care for the people and not the corporations is imperative. Expanded and improved Medicare for all!
