Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Hoping caution prevails over vengeance with ACA

I have two words of advice for the Republican Congress as it gets ready to perform major surgery on Obamacare: Go slow.

Obamacare itself was passed so quickly that even its Democrat sponsors weren’t able to tell you exactly what was in it.

The result seems to have been a well-meant but deeply flawed attempt to spread health insurance to everyone and get a handle on reducing at least the soaring rate of inflation in our health care costs.

So far Obamacare seems to have achieved neither goal, even though the Democrats, in my opinion, have underplayed Obamacare’s benefits. They have ceded control of the message on Obamacare to GOP mouthpieces who have distorted its record and overstated its faults.

The Affordable Care Act does need some overhauling, however, and I would only ask that Republicans don’t repeat haste and impatience that the opposition party members demonstrated in 2009 when they rushed it through.

In the late 1990s, the California Legislature in a few quick weeks railroaded into law a bill deregulating the state’s electric utility industry.

The plan was slapped together by legislators who had no real knowledge about what they were trying to build.

By the year 2000, Enron had discovered the deregulation plan’s cavernous loopholes. That company learned how to manipulate power production and created artificial shortages to balloon wholesale electricity prices to many times the retail rates utilities were allowed to charge.

PGandE, the state’s largest electric utility, declared bankruptcy and Southern California Edison, its next largest utility, came nearly within a coin-flip of throwing in the towel.

I was a So Cal Edison employee at the time, and my memories of that period are painful.

The state’s then governor, Gray Davis, then decided to spend state dollars to keep our lights on rather than raise retail rates. From January 2001 to March 2001 alone, the state shelled out $3 billion in ransom to Enron and the other pirates, and continued to spend at that rate through bonds for nearly the entire year.

I still believe California never fully recovered from this cash-draining disaster.

Like California’s spit-and-baling-wire electric deregulation plan, Obamacare was passed in a hurry and its flaws caught up with it quickly.

To me, the lesson is plain.

Even though the Republicans have made the repeal of the Affordable Care Act a top priority, I hope that caution will prevail over vengeance as they prepare their scalpels.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at: [email protected]