Tag Archives: Obamacare

Self-employment is easier if you’re not at the mercy of health-insurance companies

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I am thankful every day that my wife has a good job that includes affordable health insurance for our family. But seeing the Republican Party attempt to demolish the Affordable Care Act over the past few months has made me even more appreciative of being a kept man.

For as long as I’ve been self-employed, I’ve been able to tell myself that if my wife’s job ever went away, the ACA would give us a fair shot at keeping health insurance for the three of us–even today, the rates I see quoted at HealthCare.gov remain reasonable. Meanwhile, not having to worry about exceeding lifetime coverage caps (my friend Kate Washington’s testimony about the costs of her husband Brad’s treatments for cancer are essential reading) or being judged to have a pre-existing condition takes a lot of anxiety off my mind.

Most of the GOP’s proposed replacements for the ACA would have taken a hammer to some if not all of those protections. It’s possible that my wife’s premiums would have dropped as a result. But we don’t want to trim that bill at the cost of screwing over other people.

Like, for example, self-employed friends who get their coverages on ACA exchanges. Tom Bridge and his wife Tiffany each run tech consultancies in D.C., and without the law’s protection they’d be looking at vastly higher coverage for themselves and their son. He’s tweeted often and well about how this product of the Democratic Party has allowed him to build a business.

Friday morning’s Senate defeat (thanks, Senators Collins, McCain and Murkowski and all 48 of their Democratic colleagues) against the latest in a long line of ACA-gutting bills drafted in secret and in haste should ease the existential dread they and many others have been feeling.

(President Trump being President Trump, he won’t shut up on Twitter about how the GOP should keep trying to kill “Obamacare” despite its unbroken record of failure so far. He’s the Black Knight of American politics on this subject.)

It does not, however, end the need to fix what’s wrong with the ACA in some markets. Another freelancer friend, Seattle-based tech writer Glenn Fleishman, has seen his costs climb to “ridiculous” levels–as in $20,000 this year. He’s now seeking full-time employment to escape that.

Now would be a great time for the Republican Party to accept that Americans have decided health insurance shouldn’t be left as a privilege, then bring some business smarts towards crafting the most efficient, choice-driven way to meet that goal. Since most other industrialized countries achieved universal coverage long ago, there’s a huge variety of ideas for them to steal, and which Republicans could have learned from over the past seven years instead of repeatedly staging stunt votes against the ACA.

The party that constantly says it speaks for entrepreneurs should be able to sell this as making it easier for people to start a business and create jobs. Or the GOP can continue to try to tear down this part of President Obama’s legacy, all so the self-employed can once again be “free” to run into the embrace of a large corporation if they don’t want to have to worry about getting sick.

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Don’t blame this nonsense on “Washington” or “Congress”

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Most of the federal government shut down at midnight, and that sucks for multiple reasons. (Beyond the basic breakdown in democratic government on display, the shutdown has cut off a few friends from their next paychecks.) But spare me the ritual outrage over the evils of “Washington” or “Congress.”

Capitol stop-sign barrierThe former is not just a political abstraction but a city of 632,323 people. Most of the residents of the District of Columbia have nothing to do with Congress, and none have voting representation there.

As for the latter, there’s a great deal to dislike in the deliberative body that meets and occasionally gets actual work done a few blocks south of Union Station. But it’s an epic feat of false equivalency to blame the shutdown on some bipartisan failure to cooperate.

One part of one party in one house of Congress made it happen. That segment of House Republicans deeply loathes the Affordable Care Act (would that all these advocates of individual liberty were also at the barricades over the NSA’s subversion of the Fourth Amendment), have already staged dozens of stunt votes against it, and yesterday led the rest of the House GOP to hold up the entire federal budget over a policy that won a mandate in two presidential elections and survived the Supreme Court’s scrutiny.

That won’t work, on account of the simple math of a Democratic majority in the Senate and the absence of a veto-proof Republican majority in the House. That’s normally a cue to compromise. So is the political reality that every minute that ACA insurance signups continue in overwhelming numbers–oh, yes, that’s one thing the government shutdown didn’t stop–Obamacare collects more constituents.

In days or weeks, I trust that enough of the House will realize this–hopefully before the true  believers there shove the country into default. In the meantime, don’t mistake those in the grip of a preexisting condition some have diagnosed as Obamacare Derangement Syndrome for the entirety of Congress, and please leave the good city of Washington right out of this.