Obamacare has long way to go
On Tuesday evening, a couple dozen Journal readers made it clear that for many Americans the revolution is unfolding pretty slowly.
Our readers had submitted questions over the past few weeks that they wanted to pose to Rep.
Obamacare has touched just about everyone. The act includes rules that penalize hospitals for delivering low-quality care to
Little-noticed ACA provisions encourage research into and adoption of evidence-based medical practice and reform of payment systems.
The ACA's major dual objectives of getting coverage for as many formerly uninsured Americans as possible while at the same time preserving the insurance industry seem to have been largely achieved. The federal government says 16.4 million people who would have been without coverage have health insurance today as a result of the ACA. Marketplace responses to the act include some insurance industry and hospital consolidation, but no one expects for-profit insurers to disappear.
If that were all there is to health care we could declare victory and uncork the champagne. Tuesday's readers forum made it clear there is much more to do.
Paying for coverage is still a struggle, readers said. Premiums are only a part of the equation. People are worried about deductibles and copayments. There is worry about how the nation will afford the Affordable Care Act.
The cost and quality of care trouble some. Readers described struggles to afford durable medical equipment and expensive pharmaceuticals. They wondered why the medical system can still treat people as a collection of body parts and ailments when the ACA promised a new approach designed to reward health care providers for quality of care instead of quantity of care. Far from being a coordinated system of providers who work together to keep us healthy, the system is as fragmented as ever, the readers said.
There was resentment at the power private insurers have over patient care and fear that as a nation we do not produce enough medical providers to serve the millions of Americans who have insurance for the first time. Readers recognized that all of this will cost money and that someone will have to pay the bills.
Readers discussed the moral dimensions of health care. They questioned how much profit is enough for a
Our insurance and health care industry guests told of 22,000 pages of new regulations that accompanied the ACA, with more on the way, and financial pressures on smaller practices that affect quality of care and force private practitioners into corporate-style groups.
I was reminded of the British biologist
We could certainly constrain the profits of pharmaceutical companies, and perhaps we should. At the same time, it is those much-reviled profits that are the very reason pharmaceutical companies create the new drugs that do us so much good.
It is highly unlikely that medical educators will produce enough practitioners to satisfy our demand for care, so it is only logical that different, innovative ways of providing care will have to be found. That means that new and innovative ways of paying for care will have to be found, because no one is going to take the risk of changing time-tested business practices unless there is some hope of being paid.
The list goes on. And on. We're talking about a system with far more moving parts than any act of
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to
___
(c)2015 the Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.)
Visit the Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.) at www.abqjournal.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Advisor News
Annuity News
Health/Employee Benefits News
Life Insurance News