There is no universal healthcare in the U.S. There's a tax penalty if you don't buy insurance. There are subsidies for buying insurance, but no fundamental change unless higher premiums and higher taxes are considered fundamental change.
How can you claim universal healthcare, with 12% [1] of the population not covered by any form of health insurance?
The US system has very little in common with European style universal healthcare. To say nothing of the extreme cost most Americans still pay for their health insurance, or the bankruptcies that are still overwhelming in the system.
Universal healthcare that bankrupts millions of people? That's an inherently ridiculous premise.
The US system is just mandatory national insurance, which is also the model found in some European countries, for example Switzerland. Single-payer is not the only way to achieve universal healthcare, nor even the only way it's done in Europe.
Maybe it doesn't work as well, but that's down to the details, not because it's inherently different in how it works.
If you test positive for AIDS you can after the fact buy health insurance long before you need significant medical care. That implies a defacto basic level of coverage for long term chronic conditions which is by far the largest issue.
PS: As to the 11.9% figure, that does not include large numbers of people with significant access to health care that’s not based on insurance. EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White_Care_Act 'improve availability of care for low-income, uninsured and under-insured victims of AIDS and their families.'
The VA also provides a lot of free healthcare for people without insurance. Not to mention prisoners getting free healthcare.
If universal is not total, then we've always had universal healthcare. Oh, and you might want to inform all dictionaries they have the incorrect definition of universal.
The legislation signed by Obama is not universal healthcare in any sense. Maybe universal health insurance, but certainly not healthcare. Insurance does not make healthcare affordable.
Universal is all people. (x axis) Total as in covering all conditions. (y axis)
"Universal health care is not a one-size-fits-all concept and does not imply coverage for all people for everything." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care Note from that page: "The Swiss Healthcare system and US Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are based on compulsory insurance."
PS: Hospitals are required to treat some life threating heath conditions like gunshot wounds without asking about payment. So, that also counts as a limited (some conditions) form of universal (all people) heath care.
Arguably, free speech would be universal but not total as there are limits on nonpolitical speech.
Edit: IMO, the implementation was terrible, but it's still a huge improvement.
It was his pen, that was his biggest contribution to it. His involvement in crafting the legislation, and getting the necessary votes, was almost non-existent. It was the super majority Democratic Congress that was responsible for making the ACA happen. Both in terms of wrangling the votes together, and reaching the countless compromises necessary to get it through by the slim margin it ultimately passed by.
You are focused on the mechanics of how it got passed. But it was clearly his major priority and wouldn't have happened without him being in office. So, I apologize, but your statement seems at best completely inaccurate to me
Hmmmm, Hillary tried to do the same thing a long time ago and failed. But more importantly, even if you are correct, that is totally irrelevant to whether or not Obama had anything to do with it.
> So Hillary couldn't or wouldn't have done the same thing?
Its obviously not demonstrable, but perhaps not; while the attacks that were thrown at the effort Clinton spearheaded as First Lady were largely unjustified, and since the style of plan both Clinton and Obama supported (of which the ACA is an instantiation) isn't much like the effort Clinton spearheaded (and is, in fact, more like what a number of insurers proposed in response to that), there were a lot of political negative associations with Clinton and healthcare that Obama didn't have.
> Personally, I think it would have sailed through much more easily had she been in office.
Anecdote here - I know people who used to be able to afford to go to the doctor, but now they are paying so much in premiums that they can't afford to pay the deductible (also significantly increased), so they don't go to the doctor anymore.
Obama didn't do that, and I don't think I would support ACA if it were universal healthcare.
ACA provides tax-deduction bonuses to people who purchase "high-deductable" plans to encourage people to actually _look_ at the bills they get from the doctor, instead of thinking "My Insurance pays for this anyway. I don't care".
That's... about it. Granted, these high-deductable plans have various standards (no preexisting conditions) on them, but at the end of the day, its a mechanism to attempt to bring the free market back into the health care system.
Health care remains broken, but at least it is more obvious to consumers now.