One of the primary concerns is that of adverse selection. This means that only sick individuals will enroll when they need care, and others will wait to enroll until they also need care.
The result of this adverse selection phenomenon is an influx of high-risk individuals without the corresponding pool of healthy individuals over which to distribute risk.
This places the imperative on consumers to buy into the exchanges before there are health concerns. Based on my experience with uninsured populations, they will not buy-in.
The other issue liberals overlook when addressing the uninsured’s needs is the supply side of health care delivery.
Since we are providing universal health care coverage through Obamacare, where are all the providers to meet patients’ needs: where are the new physicians, physician-extenders and nurses that are needed. As boomer practitioners are retiring every day, the supply problem gets worse and worse. No liberals in Washington or Virginia are addressing this very real problem. They are busy instead celebrating their victory over insurance companies on pre-existing conditions.
What can we do to fix the problems? One strategy is to create more providers by and through “community health care centers.” But alas, that was President George Bush’s strategy and policy. So it is anathema to the liberals. Such a strategy will not be surfaced by liberals, who say they want bi-partisan problem solving.
So the ball is in the liberals court to come up with revisions to Obamacare. They have many shortcoming to address in the Obamacare Act. And liberals are notably impractical on implementation issues.
I predict the Obamacare Act will not be amended and will live on to disgrace and defeat itself. ObamaCare is just another failed social experiment like Prohibition.
