Job Corps students learn about Obamacare

PALMER — Though the crowd wasn’t always with her, Susan Johnson with the U.S. Department of Health and Social Services said the Affordable Care Act — more widely known as Obamacare — is doing good things for Americans.

“Every day I’m out talking about it I hear from people whose lives were literally saved by different parts of the Affordable Care Act,” said Johnson, regional director of HSS, who oversees the region including Alaska. She spoke Tuesday at Palmer Job Corps.

She said that a lot of negative feedback about the law stems from the part referred to as the “individual mandate” — the requirement that everyone be insured or pay a fine.

“We all should have to take charge of our own future,” she said, summarizing that argument against the law.

But what about when something catastrophic happens?

“Maybe the car hit a moose. Maybe you fell off your snowmachine when you weren’t wearing a helmet,” she said.

Who pays for that? The answer, she said, is everyone. Uninsured people drive up medical costs for everyone. She said the goal of the law is to provide “the right care at the right time and in the right place.”

One question from a Job Corps student in the audience asked about the Native health care system. Would Natives, who get their health care at Native facilities, have to pay the penalty for not having insurance?

Johnson said there’s a waiver for those folks, but she encourages them to use private insurance if it’s available to help stretch the dollars coming from the Indian Health Service as far a possible.

What about income? Will there be differences between the kind of care a low-income person gets and the kind a more affluent patient receives?

No, Johnson said.

“The actual treatment you receive from a clinic or a hospital shouldn’t be any different based on the kind of insurance card you bring,” she said.

Yet another question from a student — how will this affect the next generation?

“Hopefully they will be healthier and live longer,” Johnson said.

Asked how the law will affect jobs, Johnson said that with more people insured there will be a greater demand for health care, thus driving up employment in those sectors of the economy.

She said when the law shifts the focus of American health care from treating disease to preventing it there will be fewer days lost to illness and greater productivity in the workforce.

But what about that mandate? Why is it mandatory? Johnson said it’s just an issue of fairness.

“There’s no free lunch. There’s no free coverage,” she said. When a person is uninsured, the insured people pay for it,

“Over time I will be picking up that cost because someone has to pay,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.