Friday, June 29, 2012

Daily Kos: We need ACA but its not enough

Daily Kos: We need ACA but its not enough:


We need ACA but its not enough

The World Health Organization gives the U.S. health system an overall ranking of 37th in the world, far below other Western democracies. The CIA World Factbook — hardly the work of a bunch of left-leaning one-worlders — reports that life expectancy in the United States is not just lower than in other industrialized countries but also lower than in Jordan and Bosnia.Infant mortality in this country, according to the CIA, exceeds that of Slovenia and Cuba. It is possible to quibble with these figures but not to ignore them. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
That paragraph is from The Supreme Court helps heal the nation, Eugene Robinson's Washington Post column in response to the ACA decision yesterday.In an earlier paragraph, Robinson also makes a very important point:
Obama’s great achievement is not any one element of the health-care reform law — not even the now-upheld “individual mandate,” which compels individuals to have health insurance or pay a fine. The important thing is the law’s underlying assumption that every American, rich or poor, should have access to adequate health care.
I said that we need ACA -  it has started to move us in the right direction.  The underlying assumption that I have