Wednesday, December 7, 2011

It ’s all in a name

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On March 23, 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was set into law. The act contains a series of health-care reforms.

Between 2010 and 2018, the reforms will mean that insurance companies cannot refuse health insurance because of a chronic condition. Insurance companies cannot end essential benefits because the companies have paid out a defined lifetime dollar limit.

Young men and women finishing school or looking for a first career position can be covered by their parents' plan until age 26 rather than 22. New initiatives will be implemented to reduce health insurance fraud and reimburse small rural hospitals for Medicare patients.

Research into future lifesaving treatments will receive funding.

Too many people may have never even heard of the Patient Protection and Avoidable Care Act, or about these provisions. That's because what we hear about it is by a very different name: Obamacare.

Obamacare, we are told, includes death panels designed to put Granny down and a federal deficit so sudden and huge that it must have caused your neighbor to lose his job.

Actually, no details at all are included when the term Obamacare is used. It's as though everyone knows all they need to know when they hear the word. And it's so much simpler to say Obamacare than Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The term Obamacare does a terrific job of trivializing the debate about how to organize health care in the United States, a debate that has been going on for at least half a century. News organizations also use both Obamacare and Romneycare as if the terms are sufficient.

Rather than examining how public policy changes are working, or even using the correct names for legislation, the health care debate is reported as if it were a football game and Obamacare and Romneycare are simply plays. The terms tell us nothing about what a policy is supposed to do, whether it is working or even what provisions it contains.

Public policy is complicated, and detailed, and critically important to the lives of those affected by it, which in the case of health care is all of us. As citizens in a democracy, we are expected to be knowledgeable voters. It's time to refuse to accept simple terminology, demand details and then let the facts about all those important details stand for all to see and to debate.

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