“We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill.”
Although the quote reads like it could be part of the Republican repeal-and-replace assault against the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it’s actually from a 1949 editorial in The New York State Journal of Medicine denouncing health insurance itself.
Indeed, the attacks on the ACA seem to have revived a survival-of-the-fittest attitude most of us thought had vanished in America long ago. Yet, again and again, there it was in plain sight, as when House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) declared: “The idea of Obamacare is that the people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick.” Contemporary language, but the same thinking that sank President Harry Truman’s health care plan almost seven decades ago.
Ryan’s indignation highlighted a fundamental divergence in attitudes that repeatedly turned the health care debate into a clash over the philosophy behind Obamacare-style health insurance. To some, the communal pooling of financial risk of medical expenses seems too often an unacceptable risk to personal responsibility.
As a researcher who has documented this approach to health care, I’ve been startled to see the debate over the AHCA reignite a political philosophy and policy approach that seemed to be have been discredited – and be in sharp decline.
