A Brief Review of The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions; The ObamaCare Story ($9.77 Kindle E-Book)

A reader has asked me to briefly review my new Kindle book.

The book contains 191 pages and reviews ObamaCare happenings between passage in March 2010 and healthcare.gov launch October 2013.

In that 3/12 year period, I wrote 1580 blogs, 109 of which appear in this book.

This book documents the difficulties, uncertainties, and confusion surrounding the 2700 page law, which went unread by Congress upon passage, as House Leader Nancy Pelosi admitted when she said, “We’ll have to pass it to see what’s in it.”

To try to understand the complex law, which contains ten sections, stretches over ten years,, and effects different groups, in different ways, over different time periods, I organized the blogs into these categories – Prelude to Implementation; Obama, Words and Actions; Uncertainties, Confusions, and Consequences; Media and Messaging; Physicians and Hospitals; Politics; Consumers and Patients; Mandates; Health Plans; and Health System.

Six things were notable in this first phase of ObamaCare:

1) ObamaCare passed in a straight party-line vote, setting the stage for intense partisanship.

2) ObamaCare failed to deliver on its promises, lower premiums, and keeping your doctor and your health plans.

3) Public opposition in over 95% of national polls by double-digit margins remained constant..

4) All attempts to replace or repeal were not brought up for Senate vote.

5) Presidential executive orders resulted in numerous delays, waivers, or modifications of key provisions or mandates.

6) The 2012 midterm elections , which were were based largely on opposition to ObamaCare, resulted in Democratic loss of the House of Representatives.

As I explained . other reasons exist to doubt ObamaCare’s staying power.

“Its unilateral, arrogant, and clandestine passage; its writing of a 2700 page indecipherable bill composed by inside Beltway Congressional staff and lawyers; its expanding of Medicaid by sacrificing Medicare, its deep cuts of hospitals and physicians; its lack of clarity, its obsessive secretiveness, its anti-small business and anti-physician attitudes, its excessive bureaucratic regulations and costs, its broken promises – lower costs, greater efficiencies, and better outcomes; its over-reliance on data and EHRs as tools to make medical care more “scientific; ” its overlong four year introduction designed to mislead public on its costs; its brazen attempt to completely and comprehensively restructure a system 70 years in the making rather than approaching it incrementally; its one-size-fits-all standardization of all policies regardless of age, sex, and needs[ and its contempt for market reforms such as health savings accounts.”

Expanded access to less costly, more affordable care for all Americans is a noble and reasonable goal. I hope we achieve it. How to get from here to there – through sweeping federal mandates or incremental market reforms - is what’s in question and at risk.