Health Care

I find politics to be an interesting conundrum, largely because bipartisanship and the size of the United States has served to separate the actual essence of many issues into a myriad of competing viewpoints, bureaucracies, political score keeping and cultural identities.

Which leads me to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a hotly debated piece of politics that largely seems to fall along partisan lines.  I find myself with very mixed feelings on this issue. At its inception I believe that it had pure intentions. We live in a time where we are sending robots to mars and trying to master the power of quantum physics, but poor people are dying because they are being forced to choose between pain meds and antibiotics because they lack the money for both. I firmly believe that with all the technological power and economic might of the United States that our disadvantaged and poor should not be dying from easily curable diseases. The problem is this; how do you make an effective system to treat this problem without allowing the graft and waste that is typical of federal programs? This is where politics comes in. This would be a challenging task even in a politically neutral environment, where everyone went in with the best intentions. Even then humans are imperfect creatures, there would still be a chance that the program would not work well. Now take this challenging task and place it in the political landscape of the last 5 years. I lack trust in most politicians, but especially federal ones, as I feel that most have risen to that level largelydue  to interest groups that back them, so their motivations are all high suspect.  Given that I would surmise that the ACA would have a low chance of success of being a high functional and efficient system.  Now add the pork and partisanship to the mix and it pushes these chances even lower. Of course the whammy is going to be actually determining the effectiveness once it is implemented. Both sides of the aisle will have vested interests in skewing the data as much as possible, and spreading as much disinformation as possible. I have honestly no idea how transparent most federal programs are, but I do know bureaucracy and rarely are numbers their friend.

I guess I will have to wait a few years to get a real evaluation of this program, I remain skeptical but I truly hope this becomes an effective institution in the years to come. What I really want is for Washington to realize that the intention of the ACA is to help people, and for Washington to genuinely start acting in the best interests of the people, whether that be the ACA or something else.