Cheers and Jeers is a weekday post from the great state of Maine.
Looking Ahead 50 Years 10 years Ago…
Ten years ago this week, the first enrollment period for ACA health insurance on the federal exchange closed. Over seven-million people signed up for 2014 coverage. This year's figure topped out at 21.3 million. It works! People like it! Hooray!
I was one of the brave American patriots who signed up for Obamacare as soon as it was offered, having gone without health insurance for half a dozen years. (Being a self-employed non-millionaire, the private market premiums in Maine were insane.) As a thought experiment for Cheers and Jeers, ten years ago I pictured myself being interviewed on Meet the Press in 2064 about what it was like to be among the Class of history-making 2014 signer-uppers. Ten years later, I think it still holds up. Here it is…
Host: Here we are, fifty years later. It's 2064 and, Bill, you're 99 now. What was it like back then, being part of that first tumultuous year of the full implementation of Obamacare?
Bill in Portland Maine: Oh, it was a time. That was before we had implanted iBrains and had to type things out on a keypad, you know. But, uh……I remember the Republicans hated it. Called it "socialism" back then, you see. Socialism, Marxism…said the president was gonna throw Grandma off the cliff. The old tea party even said they wanted to bury the whole program with one of the Kennedy boys who'd just passed on. We thought it was terrible what they were saying back then. The House was repealing it two, three times a week. Oh, they hated it. They said it was gonna be Obama's Waterloo. Said it would break him.
And then the web site broke down and they had to fix that, which they did. And we all signed up and got our insurance cards. I remember I got mine in the mail on March 31 and that happened to be the last day folks could sign up for the first year. I suppose I got a little emotional over that. It was a big deal—a big effin' deal the vice president called it—and we all knew it.
So it went into effect—Obamacare, which no one could decide if it was a good name or a bad name to call it, some folks insisted we call it the Affordable Care Act, but I called it Obamacare and still do—and it just became part of life. People started using it, and they liked it well enough. They certainly brought the price down from what the vultures used to charge.
It needed some fixing here and there, but you'd have to be a fool to try and take it away today. I don’t think the American people would stand for that. It works and it works good, especially since we moved up to single-payer. I think Obama and the Democrats were gutsy to take that on. By the way, are you people still bookin' McCain every week on this damn show?
Host: And we're out of time so we'll have to leave it there. Coming up: um...Senator John McCain's head speaks from his biomedical preservation jar on the need to fire missiles into Iran. Back in a minute.
Next: we’ll revisit it in a decade and see how it fares in 2034. And now, our feature presentation...
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