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Sean Philpott-Jones: Happy Birthday Obamacare

This week, before a crowd of students attending the obligatory Monday morning convocation at Liberty University, Ted Cruz announced that he was running for President in 2016. This makes Mr. Cruz, a first-term senator from Texas, the first major Republican to officially declare their candidacy.

That Senator Cruz made this announcement on the 5th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act's signing into law is not surprising. Mr. Cruz has made the repeal of Obamacare (as the Affordable Care Act is colloquially known) a cornerstone of his campaign. Curiously enough, the Senator will also soon be a beneficiary of this program.

Mr. Cruz's wife Heidi, through whom he previously had health insurance, has taken an unpaid leave of absence from her job as a managing director for Goldman Sachs for the duration of the presidential campaign. The Cruz family will now obtain coverage through the federal insurance exchange program, and will receive the government health insurance subsidy provided to all lawmakers and congressional staffers ynder the Affordable Care Act.

A lot of pundits have called that hypocritical. I don't quite see it that way. It's not hypocritical to follow (and even benefit from) a law that you oppose and are working to repeal. It's just tacky. What I do have an issue with, however, are the blatant lies told by Senator Cruz and his Republican colleagues about Obamacare.

In a recent interview, Senator Cruz explains his opposition to the Affordable Care Act thusly: "What is problematic about Obamacare is that it is killing millions of jobs in this country and has killed millions of jobs. It has forced millions of people into part time work. It has caused millions of people to lose their insurance, to lose their doctors and to face skyrocketing insurance premiums." But none of that is true.

Consider, for example, the oft repeated claim that fewer people have health insurance now than before Obamacare was signed into law. The numbers that Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner, and other conservative politicians use to support that assertion? Between March 2010 and March 2015, approximately 6 million Americans received cancellation notices from their health insurance plans. In this same period time, only 4.5 million Americans signed up for new plans through one of the federal- or state-run health insurance exchanges. That's a net loss of 1.5 million from US health insurance rolls, right?

Wrong. What those figures don't include is the number of people who signed up for new plans through other means, such as insurance brokers. It also ignores the 9.1 million people who signed up for Medicaid,  the government-run insurance plan that was greatly expanded under the Affordable Care Act. A recent Gallup poll found that the number of uninsured Americans has fallen to 13.4%, a record low. That drop has been greatest in those states, like New York, that have openly embraced Obamacare by expanding Medicaid and setting up state-based insurance exchanges.

Of course, all these people are paying vastly more for their health insurance now then before Obamacare became the law of the land. Or so opponents claim. But are they? In the years immediately prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act, individual health insurance premiums increased an average of 10 percent annually. By contrast, premiums for mid-level plans offered through health insurance exchanges increased by only 2 percent in 2015, and price for insurance plans in the largest metropolitan markets actually dropped.

Finally, one of the largest criticisms of Obamacare is that it is a "job killer." Specifically, critics believe that cash-strapped employers unable to provide health insurance to their employees will be forced to lay off workers.  Alternatively, since the Affordable Care Act only requires that health insurance coverage be provided to those who work more than 30 hours a week, employers will eliminate full-time positions in order to sidestep this mandate. Thankfully, this is also not the case. The United States has seen 60 months of consecutive job growth since the Affordable Care Act was passed, the longest stretch of employment gains in history. The number of Americans involuntarily working part-time jobs has also declined steadily.

In fact, none of the arguments or predictions used by conservative lawmakers opposed to the Affordable Care Act have proven to be true. The economy hasn't collapsed, workers haven't lost their jobs, the federal deficit hasn't skyrocketed, insurance premiums haven't risen steeply, and doctors haven't fled the healthcare industry in droves. In addition, the number of uninsured has dropped and those who obtained new plans though the health insurance exchanges are largely happy with their coverage.

It's time for opponents of Obamacare to accept these facts. The Affordable Care Act is not an unmitigated disaster, as Ted Cruz and other conservative politicians would like you to believe. Rather, it is an unprecedented success. It has achieved exactly what it set out to do by reducing the number of uninsured while containing health care costs.

Those on the right might have ideological objections to Obamacare. Some of these objections might even be valid. But if you're going to spend most your time repeatedly trying to repeal this successful law, instead of tackling other looming crises like immigration reform and student debt, at least have the courage to stand up for your convictions and back them with concrete arguments and supporting data.

A public health researcher and ethicist by training, Dr. Sean Philpott-Jones is Director of the Bioethics Program at Union Graduate College-Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Schenectady, New York. He is also Director of Union Graduate College's Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership, and Project Director of its two NIH-funded research ethics training programs in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Caribbean Basin.

 

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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