Fifteen Obamacare) Assumptions

A plan is only as good as its assumptions.

Anonymous

October 25, 2011 – The success and rationale of the health care law enacted on March 23, 2010 rested on these rosy assumptions.

1. The Obama administration assumed, given the bully pulpit and mainstream media cooperation, it could direct, lead, and shape the national discussion supporting the law.

2. In time, voters would grow to embrace the law.

3. Progressives, in the media, Congress, and at the grassroots, would step up in droves to defend the law.

4. Front-loaded sweeteners – reducing drug costs for doughnut hole seniors and guaranteeing care for pre-existing illnesses and students under parents’ plans – would offset fears of rationing, effects of Medicare cuts, bureacrats as doctors, and tax hikes.

5. Political promises would prove more powerful than economic results.

6. Physicians and other health care professionals would accept, act upon, and believe in savings and improvements in quality from universal interoperable electronic records, intensive chronic disease management, cost-saving accountable care organizations, and paying only for those conditions with positive risk-benefit analyses.

7. The public would accept the notion of benefits now(until 2014) with cost reductions later (2014-2020).

8. Costs would go down, access would go up, people would keep their doctors and their current plans, and quality would increase.

9. Medicare cuts would cause hospitals to reduce admissions of seniors.

10. Medicare Advantage Plan phasing out would be acceptable to seniors on these popular plans.

11. Employers would swallow costs associated with rules and regulations of government-endorsed plans without dumping current plans and forcing employees into Medicaid.

12. Millions of younger healthier adults would willingly pay monthly premiums for ultimate long-term care in private homes and nursing homes.

13. The states would passively accept the administrative and cost burdens of caring for millions of new Medicaid patients and setting up federaly-guided health exchanges.

14.The humanities and IT technologies would hyperconnect – uniting the social media with Web-enabled smart phones with thousands of wireless apps – the combination of which would then ascend into “the cloud” to become a more perfect Health 2.0, which would then morph into Health 3.0, which would then become a technological Holy Grail in which anything imaginable was possible.

15. With generous government stimuli and projected Obamacare savings, the economy would improve or stabilize before the 2012 elections.

Tweet: The assumptions and results of the health reform law, passed 18 months ago, have not yet lived up to promises.