By Claire Brunner
More than five years after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the debate over the merits and faults of the law persists. Despite Supreme Court rulings confirming the constitutionality of the law and countless GOP efforts to repeal the legislation in Congress, the prominence of the issue in national conversation has not waned. This never-ceasing argument over the ACA has left many citizens and, it appears, our lawmakers with only a vague memory of what the initial question was that started the tendentious dispute in the first place.
In order for our nation to come to some consensus about the government’s role in health care, we must go back to the initial question that our country has long struggled wih: is health care itself a right? Behind all of the quarreling over specific clauses, and behind the “he said, she said” debates, lies this basic question. In order to move forward, we need consensus on whether or not health care is a basic right and to what degree it should be provided by the government.
There is a reason the arguments over the Affordable Care Act seem never-ending: they are largely circular. Lawmakers of two opposing ideologies take the floor, the screen, or the stage, with one party generally recognizing health care as a right and supporting President Obama’s legislation, and the other party automatically finding fault with ACA because they do not view health care as a right – at least not one the government should assure. A Hatfields and McCoys scenario, of sorts (We can only hope that this feud will not render such dire consequences).
The parties don’t just disagree, as their actions often suggest, on the individual clauses taken to the Supreme Court and the implementation (or lack thereof) of the law. They differ fundamentally on whether the government has a responsibility to supply health care to its citizens. When we push fundamental differences to the backburner in favor of discussing smaller issues, those defining differences only grow stronger. Lawmakers cannot continue attempting to split hairs until the law goes away, but must stop disguising their core differences with attacks on specifics.
As we arrive this year at the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Affordable Care Act, the House of Representatives appears to be slowly moving away from scheduling votes to repeal the law. While seems optimistic for the future of the Act, the battle still persists in the courts, with a decision this month ruling in favor of the House to sue the Obama administration and a federal appeals court ruling that the birth control mandate found in the law would violate two Missouri organizations’ religious freedom.
Up until this past year when these methods began to slow, the circular disagreements surrounding the law manifested themselves through various bills to repeal the Affordable Care Act, amendments to the Act to undermine its objectives generally by prohibiting funding, repealing certain sections of the law essential to its purpose, and votes to delay implementation. These efforts typically have failed to pass the Senate or were ignored entirely. Though attempting to attack the law through these methods has largely waned over the past six months, with the most recent vote to repeal the act in July of 2015, the battle in the courts that dominated news channels this summer takes the forefront of the health care debate.
Just this month, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the House of Representatives possesses the legal “standing” to sue the Obama Administration for its methods of funding the Affordable Care Act. Judge Rosemary M. Collyer found that the only way for the House of Representatives to uphold its enumerated Constitutional power to control federal spending was to sue the White House. The only real issue at play here was whether the House of Representatives had legal standing to sue the Secretaries, specifically Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. This case followed after King v. Burwell, which upheld a highly debated part of the law, a victory for the Obama Administration. This political maneuvering continues to avoid the real question; while it might be less obvious than the repeated votes to repeal the law, these subtle attacks, this time regarding the constitutionality of minor provisions of the law, have a similar purpose.
This is just one more case, it seems, in a long line of attempts by one party to undermine the goals of the legislation. It is one more case that takes a technicality and turns it into a major issue. One more case that meanders around the real issues in order for a group to “get their way.” While these cases are often silly and inconsequential, it seems that much of the backlash finding a home in the court system could have been avoided if efforts towards a bipartisan health care reform bill were made initially, instead of the Obama administration pushing a bill through without a single Republican vote. Instead, our judicial venues are now scenes from a kindergarten playground, it seems. This is not to say, however, that both sides are not equally childish.
Once again, representatives are ignoring the essential questions and attacking the other side with the fine print. It seems unlikely that these means of funding Mr. Obama’s legislation would have come under challenge if the fundamental disagreement on the issue of health care had been absent.
Argument – debate, dissent and compromise – in American politics has gone from a celebrated right at the beginning of our nation to something dreaded by anyone who watches the news or reads the newspaper. The art of compromise for the purpose of moving the country forward has been lost. So let’s argue over implementation. Let’s argue over the most cost-effective methods of getting something done. But let us make sure our initial goal is the same first.
Despite what the media may suggest, many citizens do recognize the essentiality of a right to basic health care yet still disagree with the Affordable Care Act’s methods of solving the issue. Fair enough. As those who follow the Washington political arena well know, intention and implementation are often two different beasts entirely.
Before the Republican’s efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act will end, before Americans can make informed decisions regarding their health care based on legislation they know will last, before citizens tired of hearing of the silliness on both sides concerning this issue on the five o’clock news will get some peace, our leaders have to go back to the beginning and decide whether health care is a universal right. The art of political and philosophical conversation must return. But who in Washington has time for conversation, anyway?
Photo: PoliticusUSA
