After the American Health Care Act

BY JOHN IRVINE We asked THCB’s editors and bloggers for their reactions to Friday’s news. Here are their reactions. DANIEL STONE, MD The late UCLA Professor Richard Brown, once commented that the Clinton healthcare initiative failed because the status quo was everyone’s second choice. Some of that logic applies to today’s failure to vote on the AHCA. Additionally, no one ever lost money betting against the rollback of an established entitlement program. The Republicans opponents of the ACA have not yet faced the fact that the reason coverage is so expensive is because the care is so expensive. You can’t have cheap insurance for expensive services. So, something “better and cheaper” was a never more than a slogan. That slogan showed the AHCA to be the bait and switch that it was. Health insurance has evolved to serve two purposes; to protect against health related financial catastrophe and to finance care. The ACA, with its high deductibles does a better job with the former than the latter. (Although opponents give short shrift to the mitigation provided by the provision of preventive services without charge.) It will be hard to satisfy the diverse collection of stakeholders with anything much different. This is another illustration of the fact that anything approaching universal coverage is challenging for the developed world’s outlier on healthcare cost. Medicare has around 15% lower costs than commercial plans. The only practical way out of the cost...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized John Irvine Source Type: blogs