For Obamacare to Work, Everyone Must Be In – NYTimes.com

2013

It’s been a long search, but at last here is an article from the New York Times that is spot on. It raises a good question that will affect you one way or another. You should read the full article via the link below.

I recently heard a conservative talk show host railing against the “socialized medicine” of Obamacare. It’s not socialized medicine of course, but such misinformation points out the fact that most “experts” don’t even understand the problem let alone have a viable solution. Having said that Obamacare does not solve the problem either. The Law will leave millions uninsured, millions will not comply with the mandate to carry insurance thereby creating adverse selection. Exceptions in the law allow some Americans to avoid penalties for being uninsured. In a few years we will be at it again trying to figure out how to assure all Americans have “affordable” health care. One key to the eventual real solution will be defining “affordable” and how we should pay for that coverage. Obamacare is not affordable and neither will be the premiums it generates.

We must ask those who would repeal Obamacare how they propose to solve the adverse-selection problem. That problem is not an abstraction invented by economists to justify trampling individual liberties. As experience in most countries around the world has confirmed, it is a profound source of market failure that renders unregulated insurance markets a catastrophically ineffective way of providing access to health care.

Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

via For Obamacare to Work, Everyone Must Be In – NYTimes.com.