It seems, for a variety of reasons, the goal of providing affordable access to routine medical care for everyone in the U.S. is a goal that is incompatible with our current, private-sector-government partnership; a partnership which has resulted in Cartel-like, health care delivery. I find this very odd, because one does not think of Cartels as highly regulated; yet in U.S. healthcare we have a Cartel that depends on regulation for its existence!The Insurance Industry lobbied to create Obamacare. One of the items their lobbying added was Risk Corridors to the ACA. Risk Corridors guaranteed that no insurance company would ever suffer a loss because the government would always cover the losses due to ACA policies. The Obamacare budget also stated that Risk Corridor payments would never exceed $1 Billion. However by 2014 the insurance companies were losing an average of $500 million per state for a grand total of $25 Billion of losses. Which led Congress in 2014 to vote down Risk Corridor payments. This meant that Insurance Companies were now responsible for their ACA losses so in response the insurance companies started pulling out of states where they suffered losses -- leading to where we are now. The entire ACA system is crumpling, soon many states will not have an ACA insurer despite rate increases each year that averaged over 25%.
United States' medical care provides a perfect example of what economists refer to as regulatory capture. Would total deregulation along with strongly enforced antitrust laws drastically bring down costs and extend access in exchange for heightened risk. Would this be the ideal capitalist solution to the problem of healthcare in the U.S. Although it seems highly unlikely the country would ever follow such a path, it is an interesting question to contemplate.
Fundamentally underlying our medical care difficulties is the nature of the beast, i.e., it is very difficult to create a competitive market, one that can hold down costs, when the market is subjected to a high level of regulatory capture, and the buyer can not walk. And even if it were possible to create a truly competitive market, would we still be saddled with the problem of access? Other countries, actually all other developed countries, have adopted compromise solutions to these problems which, although unsatisfactory from a capitalist viewpoint, nevertheless work better than the current U.S. approach when measured by access, quality and cost benchmarks of the World Health Organization.
Objections to these "other countries' " solutions on the basis of waiting times, rationing, and quality are, curiously, all problems also present in United States' health care! So these defects do not provide reliable criteria on which to compare healthcare in the U.S. with other countries. And too, those with substantial financial resources can circumvent these defects and annoyances and access an extraordinarily high standard of care no matter which developed country they reside in.
Those advocating the status quo in the U.S. often fall back on an argument couched in the false claim that the quality of healthcare in the U.S. is the "best in the world." Clearly, for those of means the care in the U.S. is no better nor worse, on average, than in many other countries, however the quality and access to care for many millions in the U.S. with only meager financial resources is worse than in any other industrialized country we compare ourselves to.
Because of the concerted opposition of vested interests, the problems of universal access along with costs rising much faster than GDP can not be solved in the obvious way by simply copying the healthcare delivery system in one of the other developed countries. The U.S. problem will have to be resolved via crisis. We will have to go through several iterations of which the ACA is the first in a series. An eventual crisis is unlikely to be the result of many not having access to routine care, since these unlucky souls have little political influence. Even if their plight weighs so heavily on our collective, moral conscience that the next iteration provides universal access, the cost problem will still be with us. Most likely, the eventual crisis that brings about the inevitable, sweeping change will be the result of unsustainable cost.
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