The Obamacare Quagmire
Now that the Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare, the statute’s most ardent defenders may well come to rue the day. During the legal struggles over the law, its defenders took for granted that the law would deliver on its major promise, which was to extend affordable coverage to the over 47 million people who now lack healthcare insurance, without disrupting the protection that others currently enjoy.
Unfortunately, these bold pronouncements failed to take into account the old and powerful economic law of unintended consequences. Public officials, at both the federal and the state level, are grappling with the Herculean task of implementing the law. Its internal complexity and flawed design make it a program that was built to fail. Ultimately, the law will hurt the very people it's supposed to help, as I explain further in my weekly column for Hoover's Defining Ideas.
- Comment (5)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (1)
Comments:
Aug '12
Re: The Obamacare Quagmire
If it was a program built to fail are these unintended consequences?
Certainly there will be unintended consequences that fall out from implementing the Obamacare laws but destroying the private insurance industry is not one of them (it's an intended consequence).
Edited on August 14, 2012 at 2:21pmJan '11
Re: The Obamacare Quagmire
Can't open the first two hyper-links.
May '11
Re: The Obamacare Quagmire
I totally agree with Mask. The "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" was never intended to protect patients or make care affordable. It was intended to destroy the current health care system and drive us into single payer.
Aug '10
Re: The Obamacare Quagmire
The figures Prof. Epstein cited for individual vs family plans will have another side effect. The cost for family coverage goes up 3x, but the portion the employer contributes goes up 2x while the employee contribution goes up 3x.
So as prices go up, workers with families will have more incentive to move onto the subsidized exchanges. But also, employers will find that workers with family plans become a lot more expensive than single workers. They will have an incentive to either not hire employees with kids, or to push them off onto the public exchanges, keeping the cheaper (and generally healthier) single employees on their own rolls.
Assuming a certain amount of freedom, you should see the public exchanges get an outsized proportion of family plans, giving employers a perfectly good rationale to lower their own costs by retaining the low cost insurance buyers... exactly the portion of buyers who were supposed to subsidize the rest of the insurance pool in the first place.
Massive government interventions with unintended consequences? Shocking!
Feb '12
Re: The Obamacare Quagmire
I went to "Defining Ideas" and read your column. Thank you for explaining these pieces of the puzzle and thank you for your warning. I have had a very bad feeling about this law, and now I know I am right to fear it. What a mess we are in.