Our Continuing Healthcare Crisis, Part 3: The Obamacare Scorecard

[eridani]

Campaign for America's Future
http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130530/introducing-the-obamacare-scorecard

Conclusion
We'll be updating this scorecard as its provisions take effect, but one thing's already clear: While the law does some good things, it will only marginally improve upon a fundamentally broken system.

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: In this article, Richard Eskow of Campaign for America's Future scores the effectiveness of several features of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) as it is being implemented. His take is that Obamacare provides only marginal improvements to a "fundamentally broken system."

The importance of this observation is that it comes from a prominent and respected organization that provides strategy for the progressive movement. They provided crucial support to Health Care for America Now! (HCAN), a coalition of over 1000 organizations dedicated to achieving quality, affordable health care for all.

HCAN was part of the massive shift of progressives away from single payer to the "politically feasible" Clinton/Obama/Edwards version of the conservative reform model of the Heritage Foundation. They were distracted by the concept that if we could just get a public option, we would be well on our way towards achieving a truly universal, affordable system. Little did it matter that the public option would not have been much different from a traditional Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan. It would have been only a marginal improvement, if that, on a "fundamentally broken system."

We can't back up history, but we can assess where we are now, where we are headed, and, most importantly, where we need to go instead. Now that more individuals in the progressive community are acknowledging that Obamacare can have no more than a marginal impact on a "fundamentally broken system," we need to dump it and enact a single payer national health program - an improved Medicare for all.

My comment: ACA will help a considerable number of people for the first few years. After that, the massive federal subsidies granted for setting the exchanges will be cancelled, whereupon the exchanges will have to become self-supporting. That means heavy surcharges on all the exchange plans. The sticker shock will make ACA massively unpopular, giving us only a narrow window to move to single payer. Luckily, ACA authorizes state innovation starting in 2017.