Fear and loathing on the road to the Senate

The following is an unapologetically biased comparison of candidates in the Begich/Sullivan senate race.

Yes, I gave top billing to Begich, but I did warn you that this would be biased. In just a few days we will decide who, along with Lisa Murkowski, will represent Alaska in the U.S. Senate. So, armed with a lot of facts and a little hyperbole, I'm going to compare where each candidate stands on a certain issue; that issue being the Affordable Healthcare Act, or “Obamacare”.

I'm sure by now you have heard the ads saying Begich cast the deciding vote for Obamacare. In the 60/39 vote, Begich no more cast the deciding vote than Debbie Stabenow of Michigan or Max Baucus of Montana, or any other senator from any other state. If you recall, the Senate Democrats had to garner 60 votes — 58 Democrats and 2 Independents — to override yet another Republican filibuster and bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

I'm left wondering why the GOP was so dead set against this bill when it was originally their idea.

In 1989, the conservative Heritage Foundation proposed an individual mandate as an alternative to a single-payer plan. In 1993, Republican senator John Chafee proposed a Republican alternative to Hillary Clinton’s universal healthcare plan. The Chafee alternative included an individual mandate, penalties for noncompliance and subsidies to be used by the states.

Does any of that sound familiar? If not, here's more: Past and perhaps future presidential candidate Mitt Romney put this conservative idea into practice when he signed it into law during his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts. “Romneycare” was touted by conservatives like Jim DeMint, then senator and now leader of the aforementioned Heritage Foundation, as taking a good conservative idea like health insurance and applying it to universal healthcare. Why shouldn’t he like it? It was his organization that first came up with the idea.

Apparently, the Republican Party does have a viable healthcare plan of it's own. It's called Obamacare. It extends healthcare to millions of people who were previously not covered. Its guidelines give people with pre-existing conditions coverage they can afford. People with catastrophic illnesses are no longer subject to lifetime limits that effectively drop them from their plans. Also, the Congressional Budget Office has found that the rise in healthcare costs is actually coming down. This is Washington-speak for “not rising as fast, but still rising.”

So why have our conservative brethren soured on this idea? What could have happened to change their minds? Could it be that this Republican plan was finally put into play by — no, a Democrat?

I know some of you are going to say that your premiums have gone up or you know someone who is going to lose their policy. Actually, my premiums went up and my coverage went down and I'm a liberal. I dropped my dental plan because it just wasn't covering enough to be effective, and now I'm running out of places in my mouth where I can chew my granola.

So it's with much hand wringing and gnashing of teeth — not too much zeal with the latter — that I admit some of these changes are due to Obamacare. It's the part that holds insurance companies to a minimum standard and forbids them from taking your money for years and then dropping you when you need them. This costs insurance companies money and guess who pays the bill?

Yep, it's all the fault of that Kenyan interloper — and Senator Mark Begich who, along with 59 other senators, cast one of 60 deciding votes. Of course the state of healthcare costs in Alaska has nothing to do with the fact that Governor Parnell would not set up state insurance exchanges and refused several billion dollars that could have been infused into the economy when he chose not to expand Medicaid. Or, in states where those things have been implemented, healthcare costs have leveled or, in some cases, come down. No, it couldn't be that.

We've all heard the ads about rising healthcare costs: “Healthcare costs are skyrocketing, skyrocketingI tell you! The end is nigh!”

Now, there is a connection between healthcare costs and insurance premiums. One is what you pay healthcare providers, and the other is what you pay insurance companies. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, healthcare premiums nationwide have risen 5.9 percent since the Affordable Care Act was passed. In the 2 years prior to that, they rose 4.8 percent. That's a difference of 1.1 percent —an increase, but not exactly a skyrocket. That's barely a sparkler, but it is an increase.

Most, if not all, of that increase for individual plans can be offset by federal subsidies, but before you rail against having someone else pay for your healthcare, stop and think about what insurance is all about. Someone my age (according to my boss I'm not old, just seasoned) is going to pay the same workplace premiums as someone in their twenties. There is a stronger likelihood that I will spend more in the course of a year than the twenty-something paying into the same plan. With the price of seasoning and all, I may even spend more than I put into the system. That means the 20-year-old is essentially subsidizing my healthcare. That's how the system works. The ACA expands participation by putting more people, and subsequently more money, into the system.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, those costs that initially skyrocketed (or sparkler-ed) will start to come down. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, the Congressional Budget Office says healthcare costs are coming down. With more customers, more options available to consumers and more competition in the marketplace, premiums should start to come down as well.

So this is the plan that Begich voted for. This is the plan that was dreamed up by the Heritage Foundation. This is the plan that was endorsed by a broad spectrum of Republicans — until it wasn't — and was even once implemented by the latest Republican presidential candidate. This is the plan that was found to be constitutional by one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in history. This is also the plan that Sullivan has said he will work to shut down, knowing full well that any vote against it is just political grandstanding and a waste of his constituents’ time. The choice is yours, Alaska.

Chuck Legge is a freelance political cartoonist and community columnist who lives in Sutton.