Sabatoging Obamacare

WHEN SOCIAL SECURITY descended from heaven in 1935, conservative republicans wanted nothing to do with it. Socialism was taking over America. Roosevelt and those damned democrats, trying to force folks into sending their money to Washington. Nobody thought the scheme would work. Everybody assumed the same thing; that one would spend one's life working hard, paying into the system, retire, then die before having a chance to get anything out of it. Or, at best, get part of their money back, but not all of it. The government would keep some of it, people thought. You would get less than the decades worth of contributions you deserved. My grandparents felt that way. My mother was 24 in 1944, and I asked her if she voted for Roosevelt. She gave me two answers. No, and hell no. She worked most of her adult life, except for periods at home raising children, as a registered nurse, retired at sixty six, lived to ninety three and a half. She said she would have loved to have worked longer, but the administration wanted the older better paid nurses gone, and she knew when she wasn't wanted. I'm sure she realized by the end of her life that her earlier fears of being ripped off by a damned socialistic government had been unnecessary. Social security got off to a rocky start, but got repaired, and in nearly a century of service it has worked splendidly, and largely kept elderly Americans out of poverty. Only congressional pilfering from the trust fund has damaged its solvency. Medicare and Medicaid got off to very troubled beginnings in the mid nineteen sixties, but were repaired, and have worked like a charm ever since. Obamacare got off to a surprisingly smooth start, with some rough edges that still need to be worked out. You might ask why not combine Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare into a single single payer system, but, other than that, Obamacare has generally been strengthening, gaining in popularity, and will end up doing just fine, unless Trump and the republicans sabotage it in order to prove that it will implode, as they smugly claim. Trump and the republicans would nothing more than to be self fulfilling Obamacare killing prophets.