Indeed, I was hoping (probably vainly) that the Affordable Care Act was the opening act in reforms that would lead eventually to some form of universal, nationalized health care plan that wasn't based on for-profit insurance companies taking a piece of the action at all. After all, that was what we liberals were
assured would happen eventually by policy wonks who were
exceedingly annoyed whenever anyone raised the possibility that this might not be the best way to go about it.
Truthfully, this would be the
opposite of what I'd hoped for and that most liberals hoped for. I certainly do
not want elderly people thrust into a health care system where they have to navigate profit making insurance companies, no matter how well "it works" on a macro level or how much "support" they get for their premiums.(And there is
ample reason to doubt that it will work for such a sick population anyway.) It honestly never occurred to me that the administration and the promoters of this health care reform were actually
designing it with that in mind.
One thing's for sure. Bachman's on to something. I knew her comments had a perverse sort of logic, but it never occurred to me that she was right on the merits. Live and learn.
Update: I should not fail to note something that Ezra and everyone else knows: when it comes to controlling costs, the Medicare program does a much better job of it already. Now, it's true that the ACA is supposed to bring those costs in line. But when I see things like this --- that the dreamers will want to eventually put Medicare into the marketplace as if that's a laudable goal--- I have to wonder once again why in the hell we had to reinvent the wheel. Medicare exists already and it's better at controlling costs than any other program we have. We should have built on that.
True, it was politically difficult and most of us ended up accepting the outcome. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman had to have their egos appeased. But the reason liberals were so wedded to the public option was because it, at least, created an obvious path and useful alternative to actual humans once the insurance companies started their inevitable gouging and manipulations. Regulating is hard, and the resistance from our monied class will always be huge so it is going to take decades longer to implement and get the results from this plan than if they'd simply expanded the existing national plan to everyone. There was a better way.
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