Thursday, November 14, 2013

A Few Thoughts on Healthcare

I understand getting a business or government run health system would have some natural kinks.  Then again, I figure knowing this, you ought to plan for it and test the system before launching it.  Also, the government already has a system delivering healthcare:  Medicare and Medicaid, so wouldn't you just be able to mimic some of the systems already in place?  Or, flipside, couldn't you just mimic private insurer systems?  Why didn't they hire someone who worked for Kaiser to help implement the new Obamacare system?

I suspect the reason is because the law itself makes no sense.  No one understands it and worse, there are people who pretend to.  The rules, I'm guessing, contradict each other and have all sorts of wonky, unintended consequences.  But, this is what you get when policy is basically wishful thinking.  In some ways, we might have just been better off increasing taxes and then expanding Medicaid to the  uninsured, or offered straight subsidies to the uninsured.  It strikes me the Supreme Court understood the law to be basically this system, but clearly it is written in such a goofy way, no one can make heads or tails of it.

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