Deep Inside The Hot Mess Called Obamacare: It’s Time For Honesty.

Spread the love

Loading

Forbes:

“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive,” wrote Walter Scott in Marmion.  It begins to appear that the Obama White House, right up to the president, cut class the day thatMarmion was being taught.  The ensuing breakdown in America’s health insurance system, and the political backlash, shows what happens when integrity is drained from politics.

The night before Halloween the Sunday New York Times Magazine’s Adam Davidson took his readers on a rather fascinating odyssey inside Obamacare: The President Wants You to Get Rich on Obamacare He makes the unexpected argument, one bound to provoke incredulity, that Obamacare was designed to inject some capitalism into the American health care system.  And yet, Davidson notes, “According to Thomson Reuters, private equity investment, usually the lifeblood for entrepreneurialism, has dropped by an astonishing 65 percent in the health care sector this year.”

Meanwhile, in the November 24th Sunday New York Times, page one, White House Memo, Don’t Call The Health Law ‘Redistribution,’ referencing an internal memo that reportedly derailed Rebecca Blank’s chances of becoming chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, “These days the word (redistribution) is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking ‘socialized medicine.’ But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.”

Meanwhile, the farther-left-than-MoveOn left recently has seen the emergence of a critique that says that Obamacare is stealth capitalism and should be repudiated.  Writing in the lefty-left Nation of Change, Margaret Flowers writes:

It’s time for honesty. Obamacare is policy that has roots in the Nixon administration, was updated by the Heritage Foundation, a Right-wing think tank, and supported by people like Newt Gingrich. It was first put in place by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts (where it has not worked). The ACA further privatizes our health care by pouring hundreds of billions of public dollars into the pockets of private health industries. It is accelerating the privatization of our public health insurances, gutting our safety net and fomenting greater consolidation of our health delivery system into private hands. It sets the stage to completely privatize the pillars of the old Democratic Party: Social Security and Medicare.

Davidson quotes the entrepreneur protagonist of his feature article, Tom Scully, about what “much of the Affordable Care Act — brings to medicine. ‘It’s called capitalism,’ he told me.

‘Which doesn’t exist in health care, really.’ He’s right — sort of. In a normal market economy, money is the reward that signals success; it flows to whatever business best serves people’s needs and wants. The central idea of capitalism, as Adam Smith declared it, is that people and firms seeking profit for themselves will also, inadvertently, help create better outcomes for society.

But this doesn’t always work in health care, an industry in which market forces reward all sorts of perverse outcomes. A healthy person, for instance, is far less “valuable” to the health care industry than one who overeats, smokes, misuses medicine and ends up with diabetes, heart conditions or a host of other ailments that require hospital beds, enrollment in high-cost nursing facilities and expensive interventions.”

But there is a challenge to which Davidson alludes.  There might even be a systemic contradiction in having a government attempting to fix what that the same government repeatedly has broken.  Davidson:

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments