Health Care Reform: Undoing Obama's Health Law Could Have Messy Ripple Effects

With regard to exchanges, a failed idea.  They present a whole new layer of complications making them as the means to "providing competition" in order to make healthcare affordable a ridiculous folly.  To appreciate just how cynically corrupt Obama is (and the insincerity of his relying on exchanges in his 'signature' legislation), one has only to look at his administration of the early portion of ACA that's gone into effect -- Pre-existing condition coverage.  And then there's HAMP (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/27/hamp-loan-modification-expands_n_1237169.html). 

I'm still blown away at the administration's inept handling of this provision in ACA legislation.  Just this past month, I met with 2 people with pre-existing conditions who can't get health insurance.  When informed of the Pre-ExistingConditionInsurancePlan, they knew nothing about it.  These are health care providers, mind you, who had just been denied insurance (ACA's regulations include no requirements of insurance companies to inform customers upon denial of the program).  Once they got in touch with PCIP, they were told they couldn't qualify until 6 months after they had been denied coverage by an insurer, which isn't true.  You just have to have gone 6 months without insurance.

Even EzraKlein, once a full-throated supporter of exchanges has changed his tune.  From Today:

But the CBO is in the right here: No matter how much sense competition makes in theory, no matter how obvious it is that it will drive down the price of healthcare, the fact is that it keeps failing when we put it into practice.


When I asked Sen. RonWyden to give me examples of programs that made him confident that competition could work, he mentioned the FederalEmployeeHealthBenefitsProgram (FEHBP) and the CaliforniaPublicEmployeesRetirementSystem (CalPERS). Rep. PaulRyan has also pointed towards the FEHBP as a model for his plans. The only problem? Neither system controls costs — a fact that poses difficulties for both conservative efforts to reform Medicare and Democratic efforts to reform health care:

The Medicare program includes MedicareAdvantage — a menu of competitive managed-care options meant to provide better service at a lower cost. That, too, has been a failure.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost