After ObamaCare Fails,  Right or Left

My Country, Right or Left

 George Orwell (1903-1950), Title of 1940 Essay

Perhaps the disastrous healthcare.gov rollout and millions of health plan cancellations have done us a favor.   These failings remind us that ObamaCare must be changed.  It’s current structure is to flawed to work.  It cannot meet the needs and expectations of every individual citizen.

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial board gives these nine reasons for ObamaCare’s inevitable failure (“Manias, Panics and ObamaCare Crashes, November 23-24, 2013)

1.      Technology woes beyond Dec.1.

2.      More cancelled health plans.

3.      Small business insurance disruption.

4.      The viability of the exchanges.

5.      Rate shock round two.

6.      You can’t keep your ObamaCare plan.

7.      …or your Medicare Advantage plan.

8.      And maybe your doctor.

9.      Physician dissatisfaction.

That leaves two options.

·         Go right towards a market-driven, competition-driven system that covers the poor and those with pre-existing illnesses.  Create an alternative system  that features wider choice of plans,   tax credits for all,  shopping across state lines,   health savings accounts with low premiums and high deductibles with catastrophic ceilings, subsidized risk pools for the previously sick, tort reform.   This system must be clearly understandable, workable,, and affordable  for individuals and for the nation as a whole.

·         Go left with government-regulated  single-payer or its equivalent,  Medicare or Medicaid for all.   Private plans, regulated with  lids on profits, acting as public utilities, could deliver health care services, as is being carried out in countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland.  It must be efficient and as free of bureaucrtic inefficiencies and burdens on individual liberties as possible.   

The right approach is probably  more workable in a  capitalistic, center-right  country like America.  The left approach  is more to the liking of President Obama and his ideological followers. Whatever evolves after ObamaCare is its present form falters will likely be hybrid  system somewhere between the two approaches.

The Wall  Street Journal’s guess is that President Obama’s approach will be,  to: “Blame others, stretch or break the law to plug the holes, and try to keep the Democrats from breaking ranks before the 2014 elections.”

I am less cynical.  I believe the American electorate will force politicians to come to their senses and to a consensus to do something that fits American culture and its peoples’ desires for individual  and affordable freedoms.  

This will require delaying , re-opening,  re-examining , and changiing  the pillars of the law.

Tweet:   Because of chaos of healthcare.gov and cancelled policies,   ObamaCare will be delayed and significantly altered  but not repealed.