Thursday, October 06, 2016

Designed This Way, Or Just Really Wrong and Screwed Up?

I'm not sure the Democrats in Congress and the White House were actually smart enough to make a program that would fail so spectacularly that they would have to go back and try for single payer in order to fix it.  Oh, I'm sure they planned to do that anyway, but I believe they really believed their own rhetoric--they actually thought Obamacare would work. 

Only MSNBC viewers and New York Times readers could possibly have believed that:
“Tennessee is ground zero for ObamaCare’s nationwide implosion. Late last month the state insurance commissioner, Julie Mix McPeak, approved premium increases of up to 62% in a bid to save the exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act. ‘I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse,’ she said.

Then last week BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it would leave three of the state’s largest exchange markets—Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville. ‘We have experienced losses approaching $500 million over the course of three years on ACA plans,’ the company said, 'which is unsustainable.’ As a result, more than 100,000 Tennesseans will be forced to seek out new coverage for 2017.”
How, with a complete and total lack of evidence, people could think that government is the solution to the vast majority of problems, I'm at a loss to understand or explain.  Cause--well, yes, of course, but not the solution.

2 comments:

Mike Thiac said...

Darren, I must respectfully disagree. The purpose of Obamacare is to be the bridge to single payer. There are multiple things that could have been done to bring down cost (e.g. allow insurance sales across state lines, legal reform ala Texas), increase the number of providers (e.g. allow LPNs and PAs to do more routine medicine) or other options. But none of that was ever considered and that was never the intent. The "Private Option" is the final goal...not that you or I will be able to afford the "Private Option."

Pseudotsuga said...

"How, with a complete and total lack of evidence, people could think that government is the solution to the vast majority of problems, I'm at a loss to understand or explain."
That's because you are asking people to use logic and reason to defend a position that they did not use reason or logic to get into.
The vast majority of voters don't "think" about government, but they feel certain ways about it, since the feedback loop is shorter and fed by media feelgood/feelbad rhetoric. Reasoning is hard and cold, and doesn't play well on the 5 o'clock news.