What an inconvenient mess the Affordable Healthcare Web-Site debacle has become. Any other company planning a roll-out of this magnitude would have spent months, maybe even a year, testing a rolling out the site in layers. And frankly there is no company that would ever need to roll out something on this kind of grand scale.
But this website rollout was not given that kind of time and courtesy. Why? First and foremost because of the arbitrary dates in the law. Hey, did the web designers, health care specialists, the architects of the law, and accountants ever have a meeting? Secondly, there was a strong opinion that the law was going to be stricken down by the Supreme Court and so many agencies and designers were not as aggressive as they should have been. And then when the law was not overturned, lots of people were suddenly scrambling. I witnessed that here in Michigan. This was not the fault of our Republican Governor....he was begging legislators to hurry up and get it completed. It was not, and we are behind the 8-ball. Not so, in some of the states that got serious and got the job done and have vibrant marketplace web-sites.
But a bad web-site roll-out does not equate to bad law. This is a much needed law whose time has come. We will never have a vibrant economy again, until the Affordable Health Care Act is up and (finally!) running well. Out of control health care costs are things that have been dragging our economy down and down and down. The President, and most serious economists get that. And we as an American Public demanded that the President we elected do something about the economy. How does one do that? Attack one of the biggest reasons it was tanking.
What do I mean you might ask?
Most worthwhile economists will agree that health care costs have been rising 20% higher than the rate of inflation for roughly 20 years. That is a tremendous burden on the economy, because it takes money out of our pockets to pay for health care that we could be spending on other things. This is a serious and major problem that has to be tackled by this President, the next President, or the President after that. But sooner or later, this problem has to be faced head on. President Obama, never one to shirk his duty, jumped in.
One of the problems is, he didn't have people on TV explaining the law, he didn't send hundreds of teams out into the field to answer questions and clear up misnomers about the law, and there is a lot of confusion out there. Do you know a friend of my Dad's actually posted that Obamacare would put insurance companies out of business? She actually thinks that the government is going to be the insurance company. That is sad. And that is the Administrations fault.
Is the law perfect? Of course not. But our dysfunctional Congress, instead of negotiating to tweak the law to make it better, keep up the dog and pony show of tying up Congress' work day for one meaningless vote to repeal after another.
Another big factor is that in 1986 President Reagan signed into law one he very much favored called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act or EMTALA.
This law states that no person can be denied health care treatment at an Emergency Room just because they don't have insurance and can't pay. But the thing is, this was totally unfunded. So basically, this is a form of socialized medicine paid for by us... in the form of high premiums, high deductibles, and huge co-pays.
So President Obama proposes that you and I stop footing the bill. He thinks that if people could afford to buy insurance of their own, it will lower the bill you and I pay. (It won't initially, but in the long run, us regular guys are gonna love this.) At first, the insurance companies will come in a little high to protect themselves because of all the confusion, but as time goes on and everything starts running smoother, they will be going after business hard and it will drive the prices down. Including the cost to you and me.
I really hope the deadlines don't have to be delayed. Why? Because then the Tea Party will keep trying to figure ways to kill a law that our nation desperately needs. But if have we to stall the deadlines by a month or two, they can only have two or three meaningless votes to repeal it in that amount of time. Maybe they can bring it up to 45 times.
And you know, they have never found time to vote on the jobs bill even once.
Go figure.
