alt Hacker NewsThis. It's hard to believe that the Obama team could have been this financially incompetent.
Replies
Obamacare was totally subverted by the medical lobby during its creation. They had a lot of great ideas but there were way too many politicians in Congress who had sold out to the lobby (Lieberman, Baucus on the democrat side) and would block anything that would reduce cost.
And since then it has been a fight for survival without much chance for improvement. The republican refuse anything that could improve it but want to “repeal and replace” but are struggling a little with the “replace” part. And the democrats are too timid to make another push.
So we end up with the worst of all worlds. Super expensive, overall results not very good and super complex.
It was the best they could do to get 60 votes because universal health care was too radical even though every industrialized country in the world does it.
Obama had nothing to do with what's in the ACA. It was ideas from moderate Republicans (previously prototyped in Massachusetts under governor Mitt Romney), advanced on the basis that it would receive bipartisan support as a result. But it didn't, so it was heavily amended until John McCain provided the last vote to get it through.
It's almost as if no healthcare legislation gets passed before private insurers have figured out how to extract shareholder value.
(Which makes the system worse. The fiction of a fiduciary responsibility to extract top dollar from a business regardless of consequences is the opposite of "capitalism". Which derives its name from the practice of sound investment to build something of lasting value.
To say nothing of the social deviance of for-profit healthcare.)
It's easy with hindsight to believe you could have capped expense at 200% medicare but getting what we got passed was nearly impossible at the time. Before Affordable Care Act, insurers had every tool available to deny care, maximize profits, and skim more than 20% off the top. It's great we're getting closer to the point that it feels to you like incompetence that these things aren't fixed today but your anger with the medical lobby is clearly misplaced here.
Every major piece of legislation needs revisions to chase circumvention and we're well past due on updates but no legitimate bills have been presented that cover these topics and that's not a one-party issue.