COVID-19 & Healthcare

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Paul Krugman has more on the good news for the implementation of "ObamaCare" today. The
Obamacare Shock:

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, goes fully into effect at the
beginning of next year, and predictions of disaster are being heard far
and wide. There will be an administrative “train wreck,” we’re told;
consumers will face a terrible shock. Republicans, one hears, are
already counting on the law’s troubles to give them a big electoral
advantage.

[See this AP report GOP to frame 'debacle' of Obama health law as 2014 campaign issue in today's Arizona Daily Star.]

No doubt there will be problems, as there are with any large new
government initiative, and in this case, we have the added complication
that many Republican governors and legislators are doing all they can to
sabotage reform. Yet important new evidence — especially from
California, the law’s most important test case — suggests that the real
Obamacare shock will be one of unexpected success.

Before I can explain what the news means, I need to make a crucial
point: Obamacare is a deeply conservative reform, not in a political
sense (although it was originally a Republican proposal) but in terms of
leaving most people’s health care unaffected. Americans who receive
health insurance from their employers, Medicare or Medicaid — which is
to say, the vast majority of those who have any kind of health insurance
at all — will see almost no changes when the law goes into effect.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Tea-Publican strategy for 2014 is to once again run against the Affordable Care Act (aka "ObamaCare"), focusing on every little problem, real or imagined, with the implementation of the program. Of course there are going to be problems with implementation, but rather than make adjustments to fix those problems, the Tea-Publican ideological knee-jerk reaction is to yell "kill it!"

Imagine how different the course of human history would have been without trial and error eventually leading to success and the advancement of the human race. If these people had been in charge, all modern scientific and technological advancements would never have occurred because damn near every one of them was a failure at first.

"ObamaCare" was set up to allow the 50 states to experiment and to learn what works best to establish best practices. AS FDR famously said of his New Deal programs, " It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."

For all the nit-picking by Tea-Publicans over the implementation of "ObamaCare," things are actually going quite well in states that are making a good faith effort to implement the program. Matthew Iglesias writes at Slate, Obamacare Rollout Is Going to Be Like a Train Getting You to Your Destination in a Timely Manner:

You heard it here first from me in April,
but I want to reiterate that over the next 18 months you're going to
read a lot of stories about problems with Affordable Care Act
implementations. Many of those stories are going to be accurate. But
fundamentally Affordable Care Act implementation is going to work out
great, and people are going to love it.

The latest evidence comes to us today from California, America's largest
state and one of the states that's tried the hardest to actually
implement Obamacare. As Sarah Kliff explains, their exchanges are
getting set up, and it looks like premiums for "silver" and "bronze"
plans are both going to be lower than was previously expected [California Obamacare premiums: No ‘rate shock’ here].

Far from a "train wreck," in other words, the biggest single set of
clients for the program is getting something like a nice, smooth
high-speed train ride. There was also good news from Oregon recently,
where insurers that had initially come in with high premium bids are now
asking to resubmit with cheaper offerings in the face of competition [Oregon may be the White House’s favorite health exchange]. And the Affordable Care Act's goal of slowing the growth in aggregate health expenditures is also coming true.

Now of course not every state is going to have as happy an experience as California and Oregon.