The Obamacare Crisis
By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT
Health care as a necessity comes only after food, shelter and income security. The mismanagement of the website HealthCare.gov and the cancellation of millions of policies pushes an underlying question out into the open: Is the federal government capable of managing the provision of a fundamental service through an extraordinarily complex system?
This system requires coordination of over 288 policy options (an average of eight insurers are competing for business in 36 states), each with three or more levels of coverage, while simultaneously calculating beneficiary income, tax credit eligibility, subsidy levels, deductibles, not to mention protecting applicant privacy, insuring web security and managing a host of other data points.
A malfunction at any one of these junctures could prove fatal.
In enacting the Affordable Care Act, President Obama and his Democratic supporters in Congress took on the task of creating a set of information technologies that has to interconnect with the I.R.S.; the Departments of Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security; the Social Security administration; state governments; insurers; employers; hospitals; and practitioners in the private sector.
(More here.)
Health care as a necessity comes only after food, shelter and income security. The mismanagement of the website HealthCare.gov and the cancellation of millions of policies pushes an underlying question out into the open: Is the federal government capable of managing the provision of a fundamental service through an extraordinarily complex system?
This system requires coordination of over 288 policy options (an average of eight insurers are competing for business in 36 states), each with three or more levels of coverage, while simultaneously calculating beneficiary income, tax credit eligibility, subsidy levels, deductibles, not to mention protecting applicant privacy, insuring web security and managing a host of other data points.
A malfunction at any one of these junctures could prove fatal.
In enacting the Affordable Care Act, President Obama and his Democratic supporters in Congress took on the task of creating a set of information technologies that has to interconnect with the I.R.S.; the Departments of Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security; the Social Security administration; state governments; insurers; employers; hospitals; and practitioners in the private sector.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Attempting to centrally command and control 1/6 of the economy is proving to be a bit much for our Ivy Leaguers. Perhaps the greatest calamity is the damage they have done to trust, the faith between the governed and the government. Edsall attempt at explaining things away reminds me of an Abraham Lincoln statement that his opponents argument was... 'thinner than the soup made from the shadow of a starving bird..."
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