With all the furor over Trump administration “alternative facts,” it’s worth noting that Democrats are teeing up an entire alternate history, in which passage of ObamaCare redeemed a nation that had ignored almost everyone’s health-care needs.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) summed it up nicely in explaining his vote last week against the confirmation of Dr. Tom Price as health secretary: “This is about whether the United States will go back to the dark days when health care worked only for the healthy and wealthy.”
Huh? When was that?
In fact, just 14.8 percent of US residents lacked health coverage in some part of 2008, and millions of them qualified for Medicaid but hadn’t signed up because they didn’t yet need it. Millions more were young, healthy people who didn’t think it was worth the cost.
The system had problems — such as roughly half a million Americans with pre-existing conditions, who couldn’t get affordable insurance, many of them in states that didn’t have “high-risk pool” programs to help.
But it was infinitely far from serving only “the healthy and the wealthy.” That’s why the ObamaCare law was only ever popular among liberals with a fanatic belief in the virtues of “national health insurance.”
For Wyden and other Dems warning of post-ObamaCare apocalypse, that fanaticism now extends to denying the reality that the rest of the nation can remember. Pathetic.
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