My wife and I are in our mid-50's. We are in great health, but because of normal, age-related problems we are both not insurable on the individual market. Additionally, one of our adult children, age 22, is seriously ill. So, although we would both like to work for ourselves (my wife would like to start an interior design business; I want to work as an independent financial consultant), until passage of the Affordable Care Act, one of us had to continue to work as an employee in order to continue to receive health insurance. We are both very careful and frugal, and until the Supreme Court declared the ACA to be constitutional, we did not make firm plans to change the course of our lives.
However, five months ago I let my employer know that I will be leaving my job beginning early in 2014, and my wife too has made decisions she would not otherwise have made. We both viewed the ACA as settled law that we could depend on when we made important decisions.
Obtaining health insurance is not a game. Americans prosper or are forced into bankruptcy depending on whether they have health insurance and/or the quality of that insurance. Health insurance is life or death, for individuals, for their spouses, for their families. Until there is something better in place, it is criminally irresponsible for Representative Smith to vote to defund or delay the ACA.
I wonder if Rep. Smith could obtain individual health insurance for himself and his family it he were forced onto the individual market. If he has never had to choose between health insurance and entrepreneurship, he is a lucky man. Many Americans, however, are not so lucky. But for a brief window of time, they thought they might be. And they made plans, serious plans, life-altering plans, based on this.
Why is uncertainty bad for corporations, but good for individual Americans? Isn't this hypocritical? Isn't America supposed to a place where individual citizens can depend upon the rule of law?