Quote:The law will hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defin...cle/125431

Richard Epstein writes that the designers of the ACA failed to consider the law of unintended consequences.

Quote:During the legal struggles over the ACA, its defenders both on and off the Supreme Court took for granted the proposition that the law would deliver on its major promise, which was to extend affordable coverage to the over 47 million people who now lack healthcare insurance, without disrupting the protection that others currently enjoy.

(snip

But those unintended consequences often turn bad in connection with the many forms of government regulation that limit the scope of contractual freedom, which the ACA does in a big way.

The result may turn into an Obamacare quagmire. Public officials, at both the federal and the state level, are grappling with the Herculean task of implementing the law. Its internal complexity and flawed design make it a program that was built to fail. The most recent evidence of the ACA’s administrative breakdown comes via the New York Times in a story by Robert Pear—no enemy of Obamacare—who reports that the fine print of the ACA could leave the dependents of millions of low-income employees without coverage from either their employers or the ACA’s insurance exchanges.

Gee, IIRC, some were warning of this before it was passed (and before we knew what was in it.) Epstein also discusses the problems with setting up the exchanges, both federal and state and the many regulations with what must be covered under any qualifying plan.

Quote:The scope of coverages under each of these headings must be determined by regulations, which are apt to contain as many surprises as the IRS’s regulation on coverage. As Paula Stannard and I have written at great length, it is not possible to assess the budgetary implications of the Act until the regulations are finally resolved. But one point is clear: The ACA cannot reduce costs by simultaneously increasing the level of coverage and the number of individuals covered.

This is another version of what I've said all along. Obamacare will not achieve its goals because its stated goals are impossible to achieve simultaneously. You simply cannot provide better care to more people for less money. What we don't know is which of its stated goals--if any--will be achieved and what the consequences of themissedgoals will be.

I expect they'll try to hit the cost targets, resulting in lower quality and rationing, and in the end they'll miss the cost targets, too. But that is by no means the only possible outcome.

It's been a debacle since the get go. Anyone with a lick of sense knows it

(08-14-2012 09:19 PM)maximus Wrote:  It's been a debacle since the get go. Anyone with a lick of sense knows it

....and THAT is the problem. Licks of sense.