Healthcare: Seeking Solidarity Without Socialism

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Chronicles Magazine

Healthcare: Seeking Solidarity Without Socialism

By Joseph Pearce - MAY 05, 2017

Healthcare is a problem, and not merely a sociopolitical one.  If we are to believe the media pundits, it’s also very much a religious question.  Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times berates Paul Ryan for attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that Ryans’s opposition to ObamaCare is a denial of the Gospel and therefore a violation of the Catholic faith that Ryan professes.  Jesus, apparently, was a socialist and would have voted Democrat.  Not so, says James Freeman in the Wall Street Journal: Ryan was right to push forward with the repeal of the ACA and can do so, as a Catholic in good conscience, because, well, Jesus was not a socialist.  Accusing Kristoff of casting “the federal bureaucracy in the role of Jesus,” Freeman defended Ryan’s efforts to dismantle Obama’s healthcare legacy.  Freeman asks what Jesus would say about big government and comes to the conclusion that He would agree with Freeman that it’s not a good thing.  During the 2016 presidential election campaign, in another article for the Wall Street Journal, Freeman had asked “how would Jesus vote?”  Contrary to the claims of Kristoff and the New York Times party, Freeman and the Wall Street Journal party insisted that Jesus was not a socialist, nor would He have voted for Bernie or Hillary; He was a fiscal conservative Who would have voted Republican.  To put the Wall Street Journal’s perspective in a nutshell, Jesus not only would have supported Ryan’s efforts to repeal ObamaCare, but would have voted for him to become president of the United States!   

The answer to the healthcare problem is not to be found in Congress or in the White House, or in any institutional center of usurped power.  It is to be found on our own doorsteps, in our own homes and in the homes of our neighbors.    

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5/8/2017

Justin Amash on the AHCA

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:32 am

The bottom line: it’s better than ObamaCare, but only marginally so — and does not end the tinkering with the free market that is ObamaCare’s Achilles heel.

This is not the bill we promised the American people. For the past seven years, Republicans have run for Congress on a commitment to repeal Obamacare. But it is increasingly clear that a bill to repeal Obamacare will not come to the floor in this Congress or in the foreseeable future.

When Republican leaders first unveiled the American Health Care Act, a Democratic friend and colleague joked to me that the bill wasn’t a new health care proposal; it was plagiarism. He was right.

The AHCA repeals fewer than 10 percent of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act. It is an amendment to the ACA that deliberately maintains Obamacare’s framework. It reformulates but keeps tax credits to subsidize premiums. Instead of an individual mandate to purchase insurance, it mandates a premium surcharge of 30 percent for one year following a lapse of coverage. And the bill continues to preserve coverage for dependents up to age 26 and people with pre-existing conditions.    http://patterico.com/2017/05/08/justin-amash-on-the-ahca/