Letter 2 America for November 12, 2013

Dear America,

It appears that the winnowing of the Affordable Care Act one piece at a time is having a more deleterious effect on the law than could have been anticipated.  Insurance companies are playing their role in the undermining of Obamacare by killing coverage plans that people currently have for a variety of reasons and offering only more expensive, less provident plans in their stead.  The numbers of people who have suffered such inconvenience is minimal, but their consternation over it is not.  And the nearly half of the states that declined to accept the 100% federally funded expansion of Medicaid have inadvertently created a tangential problem.  The hospital funding that the federal government formerly provided for the uncompensated emergency room procedures of the poor was reduced under the ACA, but when the Supreme Court struck down the ACA mandate that states participate in expanded Medicaid, the revenue stream that was supposed to replace that federal funding was eliminated in the states that declined.  Thus, it is possible that the poor who could always go to the emergency room in conservatively governed states like Texas and Georgia may not be able to anymore, nor will they be able to go elsewhere under Medicaid because hospitals may no longer be able to provide the interstitial care that those who fell between the other available resources used to get.  Obamacare will probably survive, but the conservatives have certainly diminished its merit overall, and for what.  It's all about winning the next presidential election.  But the joke may be on them if the conservative they nominate wins in 2016 and it happens to be Chris Christie, which looks more and more like a possibility with each passing day.

With conservatives...even those of moderate stripe...continuing to scramble to make political hay out of things like the now discredited 60 Minutes report on Benghazi, the number of potential options for the Republicans is being continually pared down by the missteps of the possible choices.  Lindsey Graham--a possible assistant king maker though not a potential candidate for president himself--touted that report as grounds to reopen the congressional inquiry into security in Benghazi, even though nothing new was added by the CBS news program except what now appears to have been the fictions purported by the program's supposed star witness.  Thus, the political and journalistic acumens of both Graham and the reporter respectively have been impugned, perhaps beyond redemption.  And the commonality of the experience of most Americans with new websites, along with the likelihood that all of the problems with the healthcare website will be forgotten by the forty-some million people who will have health insurance for the first time by next November's election, will shed a jaundicing light on the Republicans who think they have jumped onto a juggernaut by complaining about it.  But while Christie complains about it too, he has accepted the notion that a good idea is just that, even if it is a liberal idea.  New Jersey, the state of which Christie is the newly re-elected governor, has accepted the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, thus putting Christie on a safe ideological island on which he takes the good and leaves what he claims is the bad.  By doing so, he projects non-partisanship, not bi-partisanship; the difference is that one is obviously well-motivated and the other is merely a forbearance of the corruption of the democratic ideal that all are supposed to serve once in office rather than a virtue in itself.

Christie's counsel to President Obama--admit your failures and mistakes with regard to Obamacare--was sage in this era of incessant political fault-finding.  It immediately disarmed The President's critics, but it didn't do anything for Mr. Obama's image.  But Christie isn't like his Republican colleagues in that while he says that the Affordable Care Act is something too big for government to do, he never says that it can't ever work, nor does he excoriate the Democrats for The Act's failures.  That is a position that most voters, conservative or liberal, can accept as noble whether they agree or not, and that is the key to the next presidential election.  The people of this country want someone who is on their side, not someone who is on the side of his party or his philosophical camp.  Take what's good and leave the rest behind; that's the motto that will win votes, and that is Christie's motto.  Whether you agree with his assessments of what to keep and what to jettison, you sense when you listen to him that he is intellectually honest and genuinely dedicated to enhancing the common weal.  After all, no one agrees with everything any candidate says, so why not choose the devil you believe you know rather than the one who's hiding behind slogans and demagoguery.  Maybe the next election will have this theme: no more surprises.  Christie might do well if such is the case.  What you see in him is what you get.

Your friend,

Mike