B.S. this was happening way before the affordable care act was passed.
I'm also tired of all the focus on insurance and payment, and not on the monopolies (monopsonies?) in health care provision. We can focus on payment all we want but if we don't open up healthcare services to real competition and innovation prices will continue to go through the roof with declining returns.
I give some credit to the piece for somehow touching on that issue, but it's superficial and again tied to insurance and payors.
It's infuriating being on the inside of all of this and seeing the way it usually is discussed in policy forums. It's like everyone wants everything to remain the same but be cheaper, and that's not going to happen.
With how dysfunctional healthcare is, you'd think if real competition were possible we'd already be seeing disruption in this space. That's not happening! The most obvious culprit is the private payer, so that's a natural place to look.
Like my local hospital is blessed, it runs an ER in an area with few hospitals, so Medicare pays it at a higher rate for all care. But Medicare also won't make an agreement to pay for care if someone tries to open up a competing hospital (and investors know this, so they won't bother trying to compete), and they don't tell the hospital that they have blessed that it's not okay to charge ridiculous prices to other customers.
Capitalism balances supply and demand by modulating prices. When demand is above supply, prices go up until demand drops. When supply is higher than demand, prices go down to bring demand up. But demand for healthcare can't go down. There is no force opposing price increases, so prices must tend toward infinity.
When it comes to life-or-death situations, people will pay just about anything. The market will bear almost any price, and the entire operating principle of capitalism is to increase prices to the limit the market will bear.
There just is no mechanism by which capitalism can consider the value of human life. Otherwise we wouldn't have to write laws to prevent children being maimed in factories, or prevent people selling snake oil as a miracle cure, or create entities like the EPA to prevent companies poisoning entire towns. The only solution is for the government to intervene and cap prices.
The only reason you'd ever lower prices for healthcare is because it's the morally right thing to do. Capitalism does not recognize the concept of morality. There is no internal force which could lower prices, so it must be an external force.
It was a step in the right direction at the time. We’ve done nothing to improve upon it since then because one side has spent the last decade trying to destroy it and the other seems mostly ok with our system as it stands.
It wasn't the only shot, we just need more politicians that want that change and are willing to not be so stubborn to try to do it fast.
Not getting rid of an incredibly wasteful system because it negatively impacts the economic status of the people it unfortunately employs isn't even conservative thinking, especially when it's such a huge drain on the economy. In this case it even kills people. Why are we letting them hold everyone hostage? Why are their jobs more important than having affordable or quality care for the entire country? It's not a fucking jobs program! It's healthcare!