{"id":3988,"date":"2013-06-18T19:47:39","date_gmt":"2013-06-19T00:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3988"},"modified":"2013-06-18T19:47:39","modified_gmt":"2013-06-19T00:47:39","slug":"plus-ca-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3988","title":{"rendered":"Plus Ca Change"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Economist Aaron Carroll compares the current Republican doomsaying about the Medicaid expansion with reactions to Medicaid&#8217;s debut in the 1960s and finds that <a href=\"http:\/\/theincidentaleconomist.com\/wordpress\/the-sky-didnt-fall-before-and-it-wont-fall-now\/\">not much has changed<\/a>. Back then, conservatives were convinced that Medicaid would bankrupt the nation and health care providers would abandon the program in droves. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n<p>He concludes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>It\u2019s easy to scream that the sky is falling. Remember when Ronald Reagan told us that\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/theincidentaleconomist.com\/wordpress\/i-dont-think-that-quote-means-what-liz-cheney-thinks-it-means\/\">Medicare was the death of freedom<\/a>?\u00a0At some point, though, you have to look around and realize that things just ain\u2019t that bad. We\u2019ve heard these arguments before. They didn\u2019t come to pass. States have all embraced Medicaid. The feds never broke the bargain. Docs made a fortune in the 80\u2032s. There are more medical school applicants than ever before. At some point, we have to stop giving these arguments so much weight.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Obamacare will not be perfect. Neither will the Medicaid expansion. We\u2019ll need to fix them. But neither will bring about the end of the republic, just as no health care reform in any other country resulted in the end of democracy itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>All of these quotations were from 40-50 years ago. Not only is Medicaid thriving, but just last year, the Supreme Court decided it was so \u201capple pie\u201d that threatening to take the program away was\u00a0<em>coercive<\/em>. I think it\u2019s more likely that\u2019s how we\u2019ll think about the ACA\u00a040-50 years from now,\u00a0than that any of the doomsday scenarios will come to pass.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Since I started working on this stuff a few years ago and discussed it with friends and acquaintances, I&#8217;ve been made acutely aware of just how brief our collective memory is. We recycle the same arguments and the same fears about health care reform every couple decades. Those arguments will probably continue long after the ACA is implemented, but at least more people will have better access to health care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Economist Aaron Carroll compares the current Republican doomsaying about the Medicaid expansion with reactions to Medicaid&#8217;s debut in the 1960s and finds that not much has changed. Back then, conservatives were convinced that Medicaid would bankrupt the nation and health care providers would abandon the program in droves. Sound familiar? He concludes: It\u2019s easy to <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3988' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-25-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-12k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3990,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3988\/revisions\/3990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}