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Robert Riech Comes Up Short on Obamacare

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, argues that thet the [un] Affordable Care Act, b/k/a Obamacare amounts to a  moral imperative, from Salon [1]:

The moral imperative.  Even a clunky compromise like the ACA between a national system of health insurance and a for-profit insurance market depends, fundamentally, on a social compact in which those who are healthier and richer are willing to help those who are sicker and poorer. Such a social compact defines a society.

The other day I heard a young man say he’d rather pay a penalty than buy health insurance under the Act because, in his words, “why should I pay for the sick and the old?” The answer is he has a responsibility to do so, as a member the same society they inhabit.

The Act also depends on richer people paying higher taxes to finance health insurance for lower-income people. Starting this year, a healthcare surtax of 3.8 percent is applied to capital gains and dividend income of individuals earning more than $200,000 and a nine-tenths of 1 percent healthcare tax to wages over $200,000 or couples over $250,000. Together, the two taxes will raise an estimated $317.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation [2].

Here again, the justification is plain: We are becoming a vastly unequal society in which most of the economic gains are going to the top. It’s only just that those with higher incomes bear some responsibility for maintaining the health of Americans who are less fortunate.

This is a profoundly moral argument about who we are and what we owe each other as Americans. But Democrats have failed to make it, perhaps because they’re reluctant to admit that the Act involves any redistribution at all.

If in fact the [u]ACA was a moral imperative and its auhors. people of the ilk of Dirty Harry Reid, San Fran Nancy Pelosi and Kathleen Sebelius would not be exempting themselves from the provision of the law. One can not deem the [u]ACA a moral imperative, and issue millions of waivers and delay its implementation.  Morality is not something which is imposed by the ruling class, but rather a creed to be lived. 

Barack Obama no more considers the [u]ACA to a moral imperative than B.J. Clinton considers his marriage sacrosanct.