Conservative Columnist - GOP: Accept that Health Care is a Right

While disingenuously wrapping themselves in feigned "Christian values" members of the GOP continue on an agenda that would destroy the social safety net and which reveals that in the world of the GOP, the poor and less fortunate are viewed as little more than disposable garbage.   This mindset is an underlying principle in the GOP's opposition to Obamacare and the need to replace America's most expensive but least efficient healthcare system of any advanced industrial nation.  Conservative columnist Michael Gerson is urging the GOP to alter this mindset and accept that healthcare coverage is something every citizen ought to receive.  Here are excerpts from his latest column in the Washington Post:

Supporters of Obamacare are celebrating that the law is not an unmitigated disaster, just a mitigated one.

As enrollment closed (for most) on March 31, the system passed 7 million exchange sign-ups. What some are taking as a triumph of governmental competence was actually an emergency rescue by private-sector volunteers after a laughable failure of government to construct and run its own system. This has hardly been a confidence-builder when it comes to public faith in bureaucracy. But never mind.

[T]he whole story of Obamacare has been a cycle of overpromising and disappointment. And advocates seem determined to continue it.

Still, some conservative critics of Obamacare — those advocating repeal and, well, nothing — are inhabiting their own ideological daydream. President Obama did not invent a right to health care, just a right to a highly regulated form of health insurance.

Americans had jury-rigged a system long before. Under a federal law from the 1980s, hospitals taking Medicare can’t deny emergency treatment to people based on their ability to pay for it. Medicare and Medicaid provide insurance to the elderly and poor. This combination of emergency-room care and health entitlements amounts to a guarantee of a certain kind of health care — often provided late in disease progression, after a long wait in line, by harried, overwhelmed doctors trying to navigate in (or game) a system of wage and price controls.

Conservatives need this to sink in: America already has a right to a certain minimum of health treatment, which is not going away. It is an expression of compassion and decency. But it is not well-designed or efficient. And it leaves millions of people with an inferior quality of care. 

Reform conservatives — the term that an intellectual movement advocating policy alternatives seems to have coalesced around — also generally believe that the extension of health insurance coverage is superior to the entitlement/emergency room system. 

Both the left and (responsible portions of) the right want to solve a problem that leaves tens of millions without health insurance. 

Conservatives have serious alternatives to Obamacare. But the only way to credibly offer them is to recognize that access to some form of health care is a right in the United States — and was so, long before Obamacare.