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A Nice Little Gift from ObamaCare Directly to You
http://wendellpotter.com/2012/07/a-nice-little-gift-from-obamacare-directly-to-you/I’ve often said the U.S. health care system is so complex that trying to understand it makes your hair hurt. Case in point: the Affordable Care Act runs more than 2,000 pages. I’ll grant you that it’s a massive piece of legislation — but lawmakers felt that’s what was needed to fix at least some of the problems that resulted from the helter-skelter way our health care system developed.
This complexity also helps explain why it has been so difficult for the Obama administration to communicate how the numerous provisions of the law will likely benefit average Americans. And it also explains why so many journalists covering health care often do little more than “he said, she said” reporting. Going deeper requires a willingness to figure out how to make arcane but important parts of the system interesting and relevant.
I’ll never forget being told by a reporter for a major financial publication while I was still at Cigna that her editor would not let her use the term “reinsurance” in a story she was writing about my firm — even though the company had just disclosed having to take a big charge against earnings because of problems within the company’s reinsurance operations. She said her editor believed readers simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the concept of reinsurance.
Similarly, many reporters refused or were not allowed to use the term “medical loss ratio” during the reform debate, even though changes in that mathematical equation can mean the difference between black ink and red ink on an insurance company’s balance sheet. That’s why shareholders and Wall Street financial analysts keep close tabs on it — and why it’s something we all ought to know a bit about.
This complexity also helps explain why it has been so difficult for the Obama administration to communicate how the numerous provisions of the law will likely benefit average Americans. And it also explains why so many journalists covering health care often do little more than “he said, she said” reporting. Going deeper requires a willingness to figure out how to make arcane but important parts of the system interesting and relevant.
I’ll never forget being told by a reporter for a major financial publication while I was still at Cigna that her editor would not let her use the term “reinsurance” in a story she was writing about my firm — even though the company had just disclosed having to take a big charge against earnings because of problems within the company’s reinsurance operations. She said her editor believed readers simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the concept of reinsurance.
Similarly, many reporters refused or were not allowed to use the term “medical loss ratio” during the reform debate, even though changes in that mathematical equation can mean the difference between black ink and red ink on an insurance company’s balance sheet. That’s why shareholders and Wall Street financial analysts keep close tabs on it — and why it’s something we all ought to know a bit about.
