Access to Healthcare

Healthcare has been a divisive issue for a long time in American politics. From all the way back in FDR’s 1944 State of the Union Address when “adequate medical care” was referred to as a right of every family until today when healthcare is more expensive and harder to get for several different groups of people, the topic of healthcare has never been put down.  People are always going to be getting sick and they are always going to need financial help when that happens. Whether it’s coverage just in case of an emergency, just for peace of mind, or because of pre-existing conditions, people should be able to get healthcare. This isn’t something that Democrats or Republicans are really arguing. The debate focuses more on the federal government’s role in citizens receiving healthcare, and this is a serious debate that has once again put Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats.

 

 

This makes sense because at its core the issue of healthcare is about how big the federal government should be. This is the exact thing that has divided American politics into a two-party system: how much power should the federal government have? America’s two major political parties have fundamentally different views of what the role of the federal government should be in order to ensure the most effective nation. The Republican Party’s platform supports a small government. It is their belief that when the government is involved as little as possible society as a whole is much better off. This is in direct opposition with what the Democratic Party suggests. Democrats tend to believe that the federal government needs to be strong and be able to directly address the concerns of the people. This dichotomy is highlighted in the nation’s recent battle for revised healthcare policy.

 

 

The battle here is whether or not the federal government should be allowed to draft healthcare policy and if so to what extent is it constitutional is certainly a political issue. There’s no argument that federal policy shouldn’t be political. However, what should not be involved in this fight is the question of who should have access to healthcare. The partisan nature of our two-party system has made it that the issue of healthcare has expanded as far as decreasing access to health insurance for certain groups. This isn’t necessarily because one political party really doesn’t want people to be able to see the doctor, it’s because once one party writes a bill saying that all people deserve access to healthcare the other party naturally disagrees with it simply because the Democrats and Republicans refuse to work together. For instance, when the Affordable Care Act was passed by President Obama Republicans immediately began thinking of ways to change it and make it “better”. While the Affordable Care Act focused on expanding coverage, Republicans came up with replacements that would reduce coverage in order to reduce healthcare spending. This aspect of healthcare never should have become a political concern.

 

 

Although the Affordable Care Act wasn’t perfect by any means and definitely did need tweaking, this report shows that it did expand coverage to more than 20 million additional people. That is one aspect of the act that shouldn’t have been scrapped. The Republican Party really had no reason to make health insurance harder to get besides the fact that partisan politics causes them to never agree or support anything Democrats do. So, as part of their “repeal and replace” initiative, the Republican Party introduced new healthcare policies that all threatened to reduce coverage. This was completely counterproductive and did not make any sense outside of the fact that it showed that Republicans stand on the very opposite side of the issue from Democrats. Healthcare is an extremely important thing for people to have, and the government should be doing everything in its power to ensure that people can receive coverage. However, rather than doing that our politicians have decided to work completely against each other and make it harder for the average American. This is a dangerous effect of partisan politics and highlights the harm that can come from two completely divided parties refusing to compromise on issues that shouldn’t be political in the first place. The constitutionality of healthcare policy can be debated and fought over, but they should leave access to healthcare out of it.