Krugman: Obamacare Will Be A Debacle — For Republicans
The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a policy Rube Goldberg device — instead of doing the simple, obvious thing, which would just be to insure everyone, it basically relies on a combination of regulations and subsidies to rope, coddle, and nudge us into a rough approximation of a single-payer system. There were reasons for this, of course, mainly political: a complete displacement of the existing system would have been both too destructive of powerful interests and too radical for voters.
Still, the question is whether this cobbled-together system will work, and there have been many conservatives rubbing their hands with glee over the prospect of failure.
Well, the preliminary numbers for CA are in — and they’re looking very good, with costs coming in below expectations. At this point, it looks as if this thing is indeed going to work.
And think about the political dynamics. Because the Supreme Court decided to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion, some states — notably Texas — will have a pretty dysfunctional version of Obamacare in 2014, although even those systems will provide significant benefits to many people. Still, the whole political calculus was supposed to be that Republicans in red states could point to the horrors of Obamacare and ride them to political victory. Instead, it looks as if we’re going to see blue-state residents reaping the benefits of a functional health care system, while red-state residents are denied many of those benefits, for what looks like no better reason than mean-spirited spite — because what’s going on is, indeed, mean-spirited spite.
Predictions that Obamacare will be a big political issue are probably right — but not in the way gleeful conservatives imagined.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/obamacare-will-be-a-debacle-for-republicans/
Interesting that Krugman views Obamacare, as it is, as a "rough approximation of a single-payer system". He would have preferred " the simple, obvious thing, which would just be to insure everyone", but believes that "a complete displacement of the existing system would have been both too destructive of powerful interests and too radical for voters."
He is a great, progressive economist but may or may not be right about the ACA. It is good that California's numbers look so positive. This increases the likelihood that red state politicians will see their refusal to expand Medicaid blow up in their faces.
= new reply since forum marked as read