How did it happen that we are allowing the conservatives to label The Affordable Care Act (ACA) socialized medicine and/ or socialism? Are they trying to hide just how capitalistic the ACA really is?
The ACA is a gift to capitalists. It develops competition in each state between private insurance companies, a sort of textbook definition of capitalism. Granted, this isn’t free market capitalism based on the regulations, but any American knows the US is not run on free market capitalism, as it would never work in the real world.
The ACA is not socialized medicine since the customer is still buying insurance. Socialized medicine is not an insurance plan; it is a health plan. Under socialized medicine, you do not worry about bills and deductibles, you go to the doctors or hospital and get your care and walk away. Socialized medicine is also single payer; you simply have health coverage by virtue of being a citizen, and taxpayer money is used to cover everyone. The ACA, however,does not cover those who opt-out, or who do not qualify for coverage.
Greg Pason, the national secretary of the Socialist Party USA said in a recent interview: “The ACA program relies on private health insurance companies to manage health services,” Pason said. “A socialized system would not include ‘health insurance,’ but would be an actual national health-care system which would be publicly funded through progressive taxation and controlled by democratically elected assemblies of health-care workers and patients.”
This is an actual socialist, commenting on the ACA. Not a capitalist trying to sell it off as socialism, but an actual socialist, who believes in socialist ideals, laying it out plain and simple.
Calling the ACA socialism is harmful to anyone who wishes to properly criticize the faults of the ACA, regardless of whether you are for or against it, any critique must be made with an educated argument. The second someone makes the claim that it is nothing more than Obama’s attempt to push his “socialist agenda” on the American people, all credibility is lost because they have demonstrated they do not have a basic understanding of what socialism is.
The ACA is capitalism, and it is going to make a lot of people very rich. The ACA is an idea developed in the minds of The Heritage Foundation and the simple reason it is so opposed is not because it’s healthcare, it is because it has Obama’s name stuck to it. If any GOP president had put this same plan forward, it would have been heralded as the greatest idea that will save the American taxpayer billions of dollars in health costs. It was not, and the democratic president of this country put a great plan into action, and at no matter what cost to the American citizen or the economy, the GOP will fight to destroy the very idea they created.
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