With the delay of the employer mandate and the Republicans going after the individual mandate, the rolling out of the Affordable health Care Act continues to be a a prickly, difficult, really too difficult endeavor and I can only imagine how many hours CMS officials and their workers put in to make this happen.
And with each delay and controversy, I fear for the implementation of Obamacare.
Did it have to be this way and is it too late to considerably improve this needed health insurance reform?
I do believe that in the end we will have to go to a single-payer system and we are just tying ourselves up in knots and pretzels trying to keep private insurance in the mix.
Obamacare was the first step in trying to change the system by keeping privates in the mix. But, indeed, it was the camel poking its nose into the tent of the Medical Industrial
Complex (MIC). And the camel's nose is getting a beating.
It is the complexity and multiple moving parts that make this effort to extend health care to all regardless of pre-existing conditions, self-employment, or no employment, high income or none(medicaid), part-timers and full-time employees, so difficult.
Perhaps it would have been much easier for the federal government to just outright purchase Blue Cross and offer an array of plans from the Cadillac to just the basics,
low to high deductible to all who were not able to buy insurance from the privates.
With the Cadillac or Mercedes plan, one would not have to wait for hip replacements or other non-emergent surgeries. With the basic plan, you would be placed on a waiting list, for example.
Innovations with a federally-controlled Blue Cross would be easy to implement with a states input and every viable option to reduce costs could be more easily handled.
Yes, there would have to be federal subsidies for those who need it. But any profits would be immediately churned back into paying for health care for all those who enroll.
The basic plan would be cheap enough that many employers might want to sign up their employees.
Basically, doctors and hospitals just want to get paid. American citizens want to have insurance to meet their health care needs.
The politics of it all just stands in the way of meeting the needs of providers and citizens.