The New York Times explained Sunday that the Obama administration didn’t want to tell the truth about health-care reform because “income redistribution” is a fatal phrase in contemporary American politics.
Conservative people tend to overstate it as socialism, which polls at close to zero percent in America.
But any government program that spends tax money collected from some to assist others is a redistribution of income.
Sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes — to pay for schools and roads and Medicaid and food stamps and steel-mill subsidies — amount to income redistribution.
They take from the more fortunate individual to apply to the benefit of the generally less-fortunate collective.
A society as economically unequal as ours would be inhumane and cruel — indeed, Third World — without at least some measure of that kind of income redistribution. We’ve long existed with a balance as a capitalistic society with a socialized safety net.
Barack Obama learned in his campaign of 2008 — when he tried within a boom mic’s range to explain to a plumber named Joe what I just explained — that redistribution of income, or of wealth, is a subject best not discussed plainly.
So he cast his health-care reform act as “patient protection” and “affordable” and said no one would lose his health insurance if he liked it. He knew the Clinton administration’s health-care reform had failed because the health-insured middle class couldn’t see any benefit from it.
Obama told a calculated lie to about 3 percent of the health-insured population, comprising those with individual policies and incomes too high for subsidies — the losers in the new system — of which I became a member in 2011.
Newly self-employed and needing to buy personal health insurance on the individual market, I found an econo-policy for healthy people. It had a high deductible and co-payments, and the authority to put money aside in a tax-advantaged health savings account.
Underwriters wouldn’t let me have it at my age until they sent me to the doctor for some up-to-date blood work.
It’s swell as long as I stay healthy. It’s lacking, laden with gaps, if I get a fateful diagnosis, which could happen to any of us any time.
Under Arkansas regulations, I may keep this policy one more year; then I must move over next year to purchase — without subsidy, provided I stay employed at the current level — a new and better and more expensive policy from the health-care exchange.
I don’t get to keep what I had. I will have some of my money newly redistributed to a collective interest — to private insurance companies, not the government.
The idea is for that money to help those private insurance carriers stay flush while meeting the new legal requirement to cover everybody with pre-existing conditions at rates equal to those for everyone else — and to cover women at rates equal to those for men.
I will have better insurance, something more befitting the odds for a 60-year-old man.
And there is this: Maybe my additional payments will accrue to the benefit of the woman featured on Newshour on PBS a couple of weeks ago.
Her story provided a far better and more compelling argument for Obamacare than anything the Obama administration has had the nerve to say. She essentially said what Obama was politically fearful of saying, which is that, for no fault of her own, she needs our income redistribution to stay alive.
Once she was gainfully employed. So was her husband, as the county attorney, possessed of health insurance for both of them.
Then she got multiple myeloma, a dread disease requiring absurdly expensive treatments.
Then he got laid off. So he stayed insured by tapping his life savings to make steep COBRA payments by which he kept his former group insurance, but at obscene rates. Then, of financial necessity, he found more affordable insurance on the individual market.
The insurance paid well, but now he is losing it.
One thing will save her. That thing is Obamacare.
That thing is all our attention to the collective interest in the spirit of humanity. That thing is redistribution of income from some blessed with livable incomes and good health. That thing is Obamacare’s mandate that she get extended comprehensive health insurance at a standard rate applied to everyone else, never minding her absurdly expensive pre-existing condition.
In a frail and failing voice, she said everyone is a sudden diagnosis away from her predicament.
She said people who want to repeal Obamacare are welcome to come over and examine her medical bills and help out financially.
No decent person among us, whether conservative or liberal or blended, wants that woman to die. No one wants her husband to be bankrupted. Many of us, given the opportunity, would donate to a fund in their behalf.
That’s precisely what income redistribution is — on a universal social scale. It’s precisely what Obamacare is.
So there. I said what the president dares not say.
In the end, lawmaking by candor will most likely work better than lawmaking by finesse.
People can’t understand that woman’s story until they hear that woman’s story. And they certainly can’t comprehend the broader application of her story unless their leaders challenge them to do so.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.