Jack of Harts

Eight years ago, I had a healthcare insurance plan that I chose. I picked from a half dozen or so companies that did business in my home state, each with numerous plans of their own. I found one I liked and paid for it. I was one hundred dollars a month and worked for me. The first 1,000 bucks was covered so I could do my yearly checkups and get prescription drugs on it. It worked for me.

Then the Democrats passed the first version of Obamacare on a party line vote. Interestingly, they wrote Obamacare in the Senate with a filibuster proof majority, and then sent it to the House. But did you know that revenue bills, by Constitutional law, can only be initiated in the House? Our Founding Fathers wanted the power of the purse to be in the hands of the People’s House, so the Senate could not dictate the taxes we had to pay. That is why the Senate said from the very beginning that the Mandate was not a tax. It was a penalty. Because they knew they couldn’t legally initiate a revenue bill in the Senate. But when the government argued before the Supreme Court on the Constitutionality of the Mandate, they argued that it was a tax that the IRS was legally allowed to collect. And the Supreme Court agreed. Therefore, Obamacare’s creation in the Senate and the Tax Penalty that is an integral part of it, violates the oldest laws of our land. Interesting.

Well, just to to make things more interesting, the Democrats lost their filibuster proof majority to an election before the House could look at the Senate version of Obamacare. And as always, the House made changes. Then, per standard Congressional rules, that modified bill should have gone back to the Senate to be voted on. Where it would have failed because the Democrats no longer had a filibuster proof majority. So they did something interesting. They took a revenue bill passed by the House designed to modify tax credits for federal employees who were first time home buyers, and modified it. They replaced it with the modified House version of Obamacare. Now the original bill was a revenue bill started in the House per the Constitution. It was a…budget bill if you will. And the Senate has interesting rules about budget bills. It is called Reconciliation. It allows the Senate to lock down amendments and debate and push a budget bill through the Senate with a bare majority of the vote. No filibuster allowed.

And that, if everything I’ve learned is accurate, is how Obamacare was passed. I think I feel dirty just typing this out.

But that of course is when things got interesting for me. Obamacare declared my plan was not good enough to be allowed. The replacement Obamacare plan was three or four times as expensive, and I could not afford it, so I went without healthcare insurance. In the years that followed, all but one company left my state, and when I finally knuckled under and got healthcare insurance again, I could only choose from three plans. 1) 400 dollars a month and does diddly. 2) 700 dollars a month and does OK. 3) Throw all your money at it and it does pretty decent.

I picked option 2. I can’t afford it, but I also can’t afford not having insurance. It’s a catch 22. I’m only one of millions of Americans who’ve had their healthcare plans taken away and replaced with plans that are too expensive for us to afford. The only reason I’m able to have it at all is because I got a major settlement for an accident in which I had five broken ribs and I put some of it in a savings account that I draw from each month to pay for this health insurance. That account drops every month. I know how much longer I can pay for my health care plan. I know to the month when that savings account will run out and I’m going to have to make a very difficult decision pertaining to my financial health.

The reasons I support an end to Obamacare are many. And that is why I support the first step the Republicans made last week to ending it. Or changing it. Or whatever is going to happen. It’s a government program, and those are very difficult to truly get rid of. I know that. I only hope that this is one time when it can happen. Before the damage it has done becomes irreversible. Assuming of course that it is reversible now. Which is another very interesting thought…