A few years ago, we cats were accused by a certain liberal loser of being blindly, knee-jerkily supportive of President Obama — all because we were happy when he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. (This accusation was kind of rich, seeing that we voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. And besides, we're not sure cats have knees.)
Well, today is our day to prove that killjoy wrong. Because we're totally, completely and utterly annoyed — mad as only cats can be — at the whole Obama Administration. Or at least, at the folks in charge of healthcare reform.
Not because we're dissatisfied with the hard-fought legislation that the President signed into law two years ago this month. It's because nobody knows about it. Or if they do, they don't get it at all.
Case(s) in point: This morning we saw a comment from a GOP primary voter in Illinois, who said she started drifting to the teabaggers after the healthcare bill was enacted. "That's when I said, 'Holy cow, there's something drastically wrong,'" she told The New York Times.
Okay, the woman is a Republican. But why would any heretofore middle-of-the-road Midwesterner think that the Affordable Care Act would not be in her best interest? Because come 2014, the law will stop insurers from charging women higher premiums than they charge men. Did you know that? Clearly this voter didn't.
And are we all aware that the law already has enabled young adults to stay on their parents' insurance plans up through age 26? (That comes in handy for folks just out of college, looking for work in a tough economy.)
Speaking of kids, do we know that, thanks to healthcare reform, insurers no longer can deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions? That it prohibits your insurance company from denying you coverage when you get sick? That it makes it easier for you to dispute a rejected claim? That it makes mammograms and colonoscopies free?
And do we understand that the dreaded "mandate" requiring everyone to buy coverage — the way they do in Willard Mitt Romney's Massachusetts — balances out the requirement that insurers cover the sick and the healthy? Which means that everybody wins?
No, of course, you don't. Because the Administration, inexplicably, never rolled out a road show to educate the American public on the benefits of healthcare reform. In fact, in the words of POLITICO: "The country remains surprisingly clueless about the Affordable Care Act."
"Surprisingly"? We beg to differ. It's perfectly understandable, and it's entirely the White House's fault. How an Administration who ran such a brilliant, on-message campaign in 2008 could later fail to communicate on its biggest domestic achievement is beyond us.
We cats HISS.
(IMAGE: President Obama signs that whatchamacallit thingy into law. Photo by Doug Mills, The New York Times.)
No comments:
Post a Comment