Obamacare Might Well Be Imploding – Shikha Dalmia – Reason.com.
Shikha, with some justification, treats Obamacare and healthcare.gov as one and the same. Here argument is basically:
- Healthcare.gov is broken and can’t be fixed in a timely fashion (I’m beginning to become a believer that this is the case)
- A potential solution is to run current individual insurance and Obamacare plans in parallel. (Alan Colmes is suggesting this strategy as well.)
- Due to adverse selection, that is only sick people will sign up for Obamacare plans, the insurance companies will pull out as their plans are not priced correctly for such a situation
I believe there are solutions to running the plans in parallel but it would require the government to provide financial assistance to the insurance companies for the higher claims and less premiums from healthly members. In the current political environment, I consider that highly unlikely.
Shikha concludes…
So long as President Obama is in the Oval Office, Republicans can’t repeal the law outright, it is true. But its implosion will put them in a far stronger position to hold it up pending an overhaul. It could be their great opportunity to convert it into a free market system, as I have noted previously. (Richard Epstein has laid out his own three-part overhaul plan.)
It is never a good idea for a president to drag a country into war without broad-based support. That’s because he needs political cover to stick it through when things inevitably go wrong.
What’s true of war is even truer of a radical overhaul of one-sixth of the domestic economy. President Obama ignored that and pushed Obamacare without doing the hard work of putting together something that the other party could support. Now he can hope for no cooperation, only full-bore obstructionism.
Obamacare’s problems ultimately are not technical but political—and they might be just beginning.
As a politically incorrect Boulderite, I hope she’s right.
