[Daily Kos Admin: Headline changed to better reflect what actually happened]
Kathleen Sebelius, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2009 until 2014 and instrumental in overseeing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
“Sebelius, Looking Back At ACA, Says The Country’s Never ‘Seen This Kind Of Battle'” [Kaiser Health News].
[ROVNER:] Now it’s 10 years later, the law is more popular than ever. And yet there are still some big problems in the nation’s health care system, including levels of cost sharing, surprise bills, so that even people who do have insurance are worried about costs when accessing care. Why didn’t the Affordable Care Act fix everything?
[SEBELIUS:] Frankly, it probably would have been better to be a government takeover of health care. We got blamed for it. And yet we really didn’t do that. We ran most of this through the private system. So costs are still blossoming out of control. We’ve talked about how the public option would have been a lever for that, which we don’t have. Surprise billing wasn’t even an issue until investment bankers began buying specialty practices and figuring out, Oh, there’s a new way to make money.
And, I also think, often the Affordable Care Act is blamed for employers shifting massive costs onto their employees in employer-based health care plans, which weren’t really tampered with by the Affordable Care Act. That was always to be left alone. So we own all the bad.
So, ten years later, Sebelius admits that the 2009 ACA critique by single payer advocates was correct in every respect. And yet, single payer is not a policy supported by serious people in the Beltway, and its advocates have no seats at the table. It’s just like Iraq, where everyone responsible for that debacle has more power than ever!
Lambert Strether