Obamacare Upheld: Thank Goodness!

The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act (don’t call it “Obamacare”!) gives me a great sigh of relief. Although I was one of those who thought it well-nigh impossible to be overturned when the lawsuits were initially filed, over the last several months I began to think that there was actually a chance it could happen. I must say I am enormously relieved that the ACA will remain the law of the land.

The primary reason for my relief is that my health care bills are big, and getting bigger. And as I age, I expect they will continue to go up, as I will need various tests, procedures, medications, and so on. These are expensive! And I really believe that I have been having to pay too high a proportion of those costs myself. I do not ask to get sick, so why should I have to shoulder the entire burden of the costs of my illnesses?

The so-called individual mandate is absolutely necessary to the functioning of ACA. Remember, “affordable” is the first word in its name—and affordability could not be accomplished if younger and healthier people were not required to pay for insurance that they would not use. We assume they will consume less in health benefits than they will pay, which means that the remainder will go to pay for people like me who are the reverse—consuming more than we pay for. Without the individual mandate, many of those younger and healthier people would simply have not bought insurance, because they (selfishly) would have seen it as a bad bargain; but that would have meant that there would not be the funds to pay for others’ health care.

Now, however, they will be required to pay, which means I, like millions of others like me, won’t have to pay as much for my own care. That does mean, I concede, that we are effectively using others to serve our own ends. By not allowing those younger and healthier people the chance to give or withhold their voluntary consent, a Kantian might say we are violating their rational autonomy, their moral agency, their ‘personhood’—using them merely as a means to our own ends, thus violating the Categorical Imperative of morality. But that is far too extreme and restrictive a standard. Sometimes social justice requires violating others’ “rational autonomy” just a bit, especially when others benefit so much from it.

Now it is true that among those younger and healthier who will now be paying for my and others’ health care benefits are my own children. And because they are my children, I do worry about the financial burden that is now placed on them to pay the trillions of dollars this will cost (in addition, of course, to the trillions of dollars in national debt we already have that will also be their burden). But they are still young enough that they don’t really notice it at the moment. And, in any case, I have sacrificed a lot for them, so why shouldn’t they sacrifice for me? Plus, they have been irritating me recently anyway, so I’m not exactly inclined to “put the children first,” if you know what I mean. When it comes time for them to pay these bills, let them figure out a way to do it. Maybe they can put it off on their children.

A perhaps surprising benefit of the ACA is that it makes me care much more about my fellow Americans, especially those younger and healthier ones. I may not care about them as so-called rationally autonomous moral agents, but now I do very much care about them as laborers generating the wealth that will fund my health care. They need to keep working, and I am really concerned about their ability, and willingness, to do so. So I will be thinking about them a lot, and I will be most interested to make sure that Secretary Sibelius adopts appropriate measures to ensure that their willingness to keep working hard does not flag.

This, then, is a great day for our social democracy. The nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote that under any government, there are only three possibilities: (1) the few plunder the many, (2) everybody plunders everybody, and (3) nobody plunders anybody. Although Bastiat argued for option (3), that was a pretty extreme position. It wasn’t very practical, and it was also extremely limiting as to what the government could do. The ACA is more like option (1), which, for those of us among the “few,” is clearly the best option.

As it happens, just this week my family and I have been struggling with some relatively difficult health care decisions. Cost was one large part of our considerations. Thanks to President Obama and the ACA, however, cost will soon be a much smaller factor in the health care decisions we make. Also, soon we won’t have to worry about difficult decisions like which tests or procedures to have, or which medications to take. Not only will the costs be borne by others, but the hard decisions will be made by others too. I don’t know who those “others” will be, but another underappreciated aspect of the ACA is that it doesn’t matter—I don’t have to know who they are. Just as long as it’s not me!

If you are my age or older, then, I hope you will join me in celebrating this day. If you are younger, I hope you will come to appreciate how important you are to me and those like me. We need you, now more than ever! The ACA will now give you a chance to really do your patriotic and moral duty. Remember, sacrifice is always involved when doing one’s duty. So if you find your patriotism wavering in the future, just keep in mind that you are doing your part to keep America strong!