Tuesday I'll be hunting down the information on how to apply for health coverage through a labyrinthine set of algorithms, exchanges and propaganda swirling about the 3.5 yrs and counting rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
I believe once we start seeing this process through our eyes as consumers and not as ideologues on either side of the debate over this approach to health care delivery, we will fully appreciate the daunting task ahead of instituting the ACA into America's health future.
"Can it work?" should be the questions and not "should it work". Joe Firestone, a contributor here and elsewhere on the net has posted a breakdown in a body count on how might ObamaCare fallout in time in best case scenarios. It has a provocative title but the metrics back up his conclusions:
ObamaCare's Shameful and Lethal Three Year History -- And Future
In it, Joe makes the point, not otherwise discussed much elsewhere about the true hidden cost of ObamaCare: Opportunity Cost. Three point five years and counting has it's own drag and death count in terms of a compromise made with no political gain through the chimera of "bipartisanship". In fact he makes a damn good case (underscored by this week's events on Capital Hill) that this illusion made things much worse with time. One missed opportunity being a stimulator of jobs if they hadn't made ACA deficit neutral.
I'm confident as the launch of ObamaCare happens through the fall, that the past three years will be seen as a tremendous waste of the resources the Federal Gov't could've applied to use a rollout of a health care program to lift the economy. If from the start, many people come away from this process resentful, mystified and managed by Insurance schemes with President Obama's visage as a front, you well could see this aborted for a year or two. Hell, they did it for small businesses because of still unsettled issues over taxes and the qualifiers for coverage, and labor unions are squawking awfully loud now about having their Insurance Funds discriminated against by the law.
I'm saying this as a consumer of health care. Which is how they've wanted to approach this through insurance markets. The Democratic Party has internalized the Republican consumer paradigm over health care, adopted the prescribed solutions to correcting market turbulence by embracing a price fixing scheme, and now are about to see how the "product" performs after launch. Of course it demands our participation. Through the IRS. That alone is one damn dark cloud hovering over the launch. As this "consumer" sees it, one that should've never been in the fine print for average and working American's already struggling with their taxes while billionaires pay less than a secretary's share.
They could've put Americans in a much different frame of mind as participants of a pool of Americans looking for basic but affordable options away from the private health care mess. Instead ObamaCare in many ways blocks the door by forcing us to remain in the consumer frame since by that logic we will behave accordingly and seek out a market solution toward the best plan at the best price. But what if that market is predetermined and not really a market at all? What if most plans will be offering the same goods at nearly the same pre-determined pricing? This will all be private, mind you and fulfill the requirement of being lucrative for the insurance industry but it will still be a farce underwritten by massive federal subsidy.
If consumers, who are already disenfranchised from or disenchanted with an economic system which is clearly only benefiting the uber rich in this anemic recovery experience ObamaCare as marketing scheme that flops the first month, the chances for the ACA, indeed for a gov't based solution of our heath care crisis will veer into nil territories.
One quote from Joe's piece before anyone feels tempted to offer the boilerplate line the past three years:
Many people, and especially Obama supporters, characterize the ACA (ObamaCare) as “just starting” or a “work in progress” and then go on to urge that the program will have “glitches,” needs to be “tweaked,” isn’t yet “fully implemented,” and so forth. We think it’s a mistake to see the ACA as just starting. We also think it’s a mistake not to weigh the costs of ObamaCare’s stately three-year progress toward partial coverage for the the American people, and just as important to weigh the opportunity costs.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
Opportunity Costs. You see even the judgement of the success of this program is going to be market based. And its going to be brutal in that paradigm, justifiably so. Since we were asked to put away ideals and a vision of health care delivery that made economic sense and chided into a false pragmatism where capitulation over the ideology of the marketplace rules, the end judgements will also market based.
Mind you we were asked this in the immediate wake of a vast and unprecedented underwriting of said marketplace rules.
So as consumers, this program will live or die. The customer always being right - but not necessarily being a willing participant of a scheme.
Good Night. And Good Shutdown.