The ACA, private insurance companies, the frog and the scorpion.
Let me preface this with the fact that I like the ACA. I support the ACA. The ACA is a welcome change from the status quo and is a definite and clear improvement over what we saw before. And although I would love to have seen single payer implemented, with the political climate on Capitol Hill and the money that gets thrown around up there, it's foolish to think that could ever happen anytime soon.
But the ACA's weakness is that it needs to rely upon the private health insurers for its success, and presupposes that the private health insurers will do the right thing in the best interests of the people. And yet these are the same private health insurers who for years upon years raised premiums, denied claims, denied coverage, rejected patients with pre-existing conditions or for other bogus reasons, buried patients in paperwork, bloated itself with unnecessary administrative costs, and saw themselves to a nice profit in the process.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the tale of The Frog and the Scorpion. Basically, a frog and a scorpion are caught up in a rising river. The scorpion calls out to the frog, "Save me!" The frog says, "Why should I save you? You'll only sting me!" And the scorpion cries back, "If you don't save me, we'll both die!" So the frog carries the scorpion across the river, and when they reach the shore, the frog realizes that the scorpion has just stung him. The frog asks, "Why did you sting me? I just saved you." To which the scorpion replies, "I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it. It was in my nature to do so."
So the ACA gets unveiled, and within weeks the big story becomes that millions of people are getting cancellation notices from their private insurance companies. All supposedly "because of Obamacare." Never mind that these policies are either being cancelled because they are junk policies that don't meet ACA standards, or because the private insurers just wanted to cancel these policies anyways and saw an opportunity to blame the ACA for their own motives. And yet it successfully turns public opinion against the ACA despite the nefarious behavior not coming from the government, but instead from the private insurers.
But should we really be all that surprised? This was, after all, merely in the private health insurers' nature.
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