Enough is enough with Republican debt-ceiling blackmail on the ACA

 A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address, in which he proclaimed that he was going to help working people, with or without the “help” of Congress—meaning the Tea Party-controlled House of Representatives. Of course the Republicans counter that they want to “help” working people too, except that they continue to advocate the long discredited “trickle-down” theory of economics—which in actuality allows corporations to hoard profits and pay their executives whatever they asked for, and what is left is literally only a “trickle.” 

How Obama will “help” the working and middle class—likely by executive order—remains in the realm of the nonspecific, but one thing that is known is that in March the federal debt ceiling will be reached, and as usual when a Democrat is in the White House and one branch of Congress is controlled by Republicans, the latter hypocritically decides suddenly that the debt is a problem after all. As before, Republicans are focusing their blackmail efforts on the Affordable Care Act, before people realize that it is actually something they need, like Social Security and Medicare. Individuals who have obtained health insurance through insurance exchanges know a good deal when they see it, and this is one them. The longer the ACA stays in effect, the more likely Republicans are going to anger consumers when they attempt to take their insurance away, which is why they are so desperate to kill it now. 

The propaganda about people who lost their substandard “insurance”—people like me—were “lied” to is just that; if the company I work for is too cheap to provide the majority of its workforce even minimally adequate health care coverage, I am more than happy to pay just a little more in monthly premiums for a vastly improved individual plan. People who feel that they have been “lied” to—or told that they were for partisan politics reasons—really only have their employers to blame. Of course, politics continues to interfere with the promise; Obama once more delayed until 2016 the requirement that businesses of up to 99 employees provide adequate health insurance to its employees, or pay the government a “tax”—which the U.S. Supreme Court chose to call it in order to find it “constitutional”—to help cover the tax credits their employees would receive for buying their own insurance. 

Voters need to make it clear to Republicans that enough is enough, now or in the 2014 mid-term elections: Either be serious about doing the “hard” things—that includes obliging corporations and billionaires who are hoarding money rather than letting it “trickle down,” to pay very modest additional taxes (that is still far less than in the past)—to allow the people upon whose backs they owe their largesse to live just a little bit better. In the mean time, let the people’s affordable health insurance alone.

(Update: On February 14, enough Republicans  broke from the without-a-plan (or clue) Tea Party and Ted Cruz to pass a debt ceiling measure, apparently in the hope to avoid the same political embarrassment as last year's fiasco--hoping that between now and 2016 the ACA will "kill" itself)