Well, some people behind the Affordable Care Act want to get to single payer, that’s no doubt true.
You also need young, usually healthy people (usually without much money) to pay into the system to subsidize the old, the sick and the poor. Right now, 2.5 million of those young people have been added to their parents’ plans for a longer period of time, but eventually they will be siphoned in. I believe one of the primary goals of the Affordable Care Act is to fundamentally change the relationship between nearly every American and their government, bending it more toward the progressive political and moral vision of “shared sacrifice” and collectivist principles of organization which require another entitlement program which won’t ever pay for itself. This is nothing new.
Some will get access to health care who didn’t have access before, and others will pay for them. Some insurance companies will gain a lot of new customers (but they must play the game right and tithe the overseers and check the political winds more than they do now). Some reasons for rising healthcare costs will be addressed (longer life spans, technology and prescription drugs) and many other won’t, and new ones will pop up.
The people who make decisions though, and where the money comes from, and where it goes, and what principles govern our politics and lives, our health, health care, and health insurance will change drastically.
Here are a few quotes posted before on this site:
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization’
and two quotes from Henry Hazlitt:
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
and
“The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.”
My two cents.
Related On This Site: From The New England Journal Of Medicine Via CATO: ‘The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate’From If-Then Knots: Health Care Is Not A Right…But Then Neither Is Property?… From The New Yorker: Atul Gawande On Health Care-”The Cost Conundrum”…Sally Pipes At Forbes: ‘A Plan That Leads Health Care To Nowhere’…Peter Suderman At The WSJ: ‘Obamacare And The Medicaid Mess’
