Backed into a corner | The Incidental Economist:
including....
"The biggest problem, and one that few Obamacare opposers will confront, is that the ACA is a relatively conservative solution. It’s not a government system, like the VA or the UK’s. It’s not a single-payer system, like Medicare or Canada’s. It’s not even a universal public system with a private overlay, like France’s. It’s a massive expansion of private insurance and Medicaid with an individual mandate and subsidies. It’s Romneycare writ large. It’s right out of Heritage Foundation’s playbook."and (emphasis mine)
Contrary to the pundits who like to say over and over that we have no idea what we’re doing, we have massive amounts of data on how different health care systems work. There are tons of different systems all over the world. The one thing we do know is that our system leads to the highest costs, one of the lowest levels of coverage in the developed world, and shockingly middling quality.
A good comment on this by Krugman
Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to. At the most fundamental level, you can’t guarantee adequate health care to everyone unless the people who don’t need help right now — the young, healthy, and affluent — are induced, one way or another, to contribute to the care of those who do need help. You can do this purely with taxes, via a single-payer system (and maybe even by having the government act as provider), or you can do it, Swiss or Massachusetts style, via a combination of regulation, taxes, and subsidies. But some way of corralling the lucky healthy into contributing is necessary.
My own belief is that Obamacare is a gift to the insurance industry and will be less efficient overall than a single-payer, medicare-for-all-system.
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