ObamaCare will save billions

[Koios]

You gotta read beyond the headline. Tip: Patriot Act was not actually patriotic. Just a fancy name in hopes we'd sacrifice privacy rights in service of our ignorant jingoism. Worked like a charm.

So you agree both were given misleading titles to dupe the public?

Notice that nothing in PPACA addresses the actual cost of health care, despite it being named the "Affordable Care Act." It's doublespeak.

Succinct: How does the ACA control health care costs?

Thanks for the link to that, but it fails to show what it says it will show. It identifies things PPACA aims to do, but most of those deal with insurance. It shows no mechanism by which the price of our care is controlled.

Yes.

 

[Greenbeard]

It identifies things PPACA aims to do, but most of those deal with insurance, or the creation of new boards/committees, or "encouragement/incentives," without tackling the issue that our health CARE costs too much. It shows no mechanism by which the price of our care is controlled.

I think the problem here is that you're using "cost" and "price" interchangeably when you don't actually want to do that. The cost of providing care to a person or a population is absolutely affected by the health and habits of the population (this is where investments in primary care and wellness factor in), administrative complexity, inefficiencies in health care delivery (be that through poor organization or deliberate fraud and abuse), and bad incentives for consumers and for health care providers (which is where things like the tax on expensive health plans, ACOs, and new provider incentives figure in).

Now, the degree to which prices (paid primarily by you or you insurance company) reflect the actual costs of delivering care (costs borne largely by the providers) is debatable, since factors like provider market power and opaque marketplaces can help to somewhat decouple the two. The ACA focuses heavily on improving actual care delivery and the incentives driving it to bring down costs. It's aimed pretty heavily at costs, and less specifically at prices. But part of the approach to attacking costs means moving toward new models of reimbursement that aren't strictly based on fee-for-service (i.e. paying for individually priced services more or less a la carte).

 

[dblack]

It identifies things PPACA aims to do, but most of those deal with insurance, or the creation of new boards/committees, or "encouragement/incentives," without tackling the issue that our health CARE costs too much. It shows no mechanism by which the price of our care is controlled.

I think the problem here is that you're using "cost" and "price" interchangeably ...

Yep. There are two, nearly opposite, goals of health care reform, and that's what makes it such a disaster politically. What began as a mandate to do something about artificially inflated health care prices has been co-opted into an effort to deal with health care costs. But dealing with the causes of health care inflation is a different problem than trying to get someone else to pay for it, and requires a different solution.

 

[Greenbeard]

It identifies things PPACA aims to do, but most of those deal with insurance, or the creation of new boards/committees, or "encouragement/incentives," without tackling the issue that our health CARE costs too much. It shows no mechanism by which the price of our care is controlled.

I think the problem here is that you're using "cost" and "price" interchangeably ...

Yep. There are two, nearly opposite, goals of health care reform, and that's what makes it such a disaster politically. What began as a mandate to do something about artificially inflated health care prices has been co-opted into an effort to deal with health care costs. But dealing with the causes of health care inflation is a different problem than trying to get someone else to pay for it, and requires a different solution.

The health care costs issue I outlined isn't a question of who's paying, it has nothing to do with distributional issues.

 

[dblack]

I think the problem here is that you're using "cost" and "price" interchangeably ...

Yep. There are two, nearly opposite, goals of health care reform, and that's what makes it such a disaster politically. What began as a mandate to do something about artificially inflated health care prices has been co-opted into an effort to deal with health care costs. But dealing with the causes of health care inflation is a different problem than trying to get someone else to pay for it, and requires a different solution.

The health care costs issue I outlined isn't a question of who's paying, it has nothing to do with distributional issues.

What you outlined doesn't address neomalthusian's assertion. PPACA IS primarily about insurance and fiddling with how we pay for health care. Dealing with the dysfunctional health care market is an afterthought at best. The provisions it does offer ignore the core problems in the health care market and impose an unnecessary (and in my view unacceptable) level of government strong-arming and manipulation.