I am writing in response to the letter from Alan J. Reardon titled “Obamacare a Threat to Health Care.” While I respect the opinions of the author and his time in service to this country, there were several falsehoods in his argument against the 2009 Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare, that I feel are necessary to correct.
Nowhere in the language of Obamacare, the sweeping set of regulations designed to bring fairness to our health insurance industry, are there established any “committees of non-medical government workers” who will make healthcare decisions on behalf of citizens and ration care.
In fact, Obamacare does much to prevent the rationing of care by mandating essential minimum benefits and certain preventative care measures. In our badly broken healthcare system, as it stood before the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, we experienced rationing far worse than any imagined scenario of opponents to the law. Healthcare services were granted to those with the ability to obtain insurance and pay for the cost of their treatments, with the most effective treatments denied to those with pre-existing conditions and the inability to pay skyrocketing costs.
The medical scientific advances of a nation should not be exclusive to those with the ability to pay for them. This is fundamentally un-American.
The claim that Obamacare would result in the compromised care of senior citizens is also false and outdated. The “end of life counseling” services that would have provided essential medical advice, not rationing decisions, to older Americans, was ultimately stricken from the law after the hysteria of lies brought forth by Sarah Palin and her claims of “death panels.”
The fact checking website politifact.com aptly titled this claim their “Lie of the Year” in 2009. In fact, the individual mandate put forth by Obamacare will bring more young and healthy people into the risk pool of the insurance market, bringing down costs for senior citizens and those with chronic conditions.
While I certainly would object to the Orwellian scenario that Mr. Reardon paints in his letter, the stubborn facts of the Affordable Care Act refute his argument. I wish him good health, and cheaper health costs under Obamacare.
Robert M. Gioia
New Hyde Park
