It's been a while since I've written in this blog. Sorry for the long hiatus, but I was working for a company that was more demanding than all three of my young children put together. I no longer work for that company, so now I have some time to do some blogging again.
Let me start out by saying that I really loathe the PACA, and I disagree with Barack Obama economically on almost every point. In my opinion a street prostitute addicted to heroine knows more about economics than he does. And his signature legislation, the PACA, is a horrible piece of legislation that should have never been passed. For most Americans, it made the cost of both health insurance and health care (both separate things) much more expensive. It's forcing many health care providers to radically change the way they operate. Some may even go out of business. However, for a large minority of Americans it did in fact make Health Insurance available to them with generous Federal subsidies.
For those of you who do not know, the PACA stated that Americans who enroll in state exchanges are eligible to receive subsidies. About half of the states didn't set one up, so a federal exchange was made. Challengers of the law were hoping to use this wording of the law to make those enrolled through the federal exchange ineligible to receive the subsidies, and thus hopefully gutting the law. Now had this succeeded, it was estimated that 7 million Americans would lose coverage because they would no longer get subsidies.
A part of me really hoped that the SCOTUS would rule in the favor of the challengers. However, the strategist in my knew that it would have been devastating for the Republican Party in the coming presidential election. The reason being, the damage to the price of Health Insurance and Health Care has already been done. If the law were to be gutted, prices weren't going to go magically back to 2007 level prices. It would have pulled the rug out from under 7 million Americans, and you can bet that the Democrat Party would be using that as a rallying point for the 2016 election.
Health Insurance and Health Care in the United States are broken. There's no getting around that cold hard fact. The PACA didn't fix it, but what it did do was pander to people who were too poor to buy their own health insurance, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. The proper path to repealing the PACA would be to normalize the health insurance and health care markets first. Gutting the PACA without doing this first would lose millions of potential votes for the Republican Party forever.