So what if Obamacare is a clusterfuck of fail? Liberals/progressives measure results by "intentions" not reality.....otherwise they'd be suicidal.
What exactly is the metric that's bothering you?
The uninsurance rate? (
Dropped substantially and is about to start declining further.)
The deficit? (Now
lower than the 40-year-average, having experienced one of the
sharpest declines ever recorded.)
Health care cost growth? (Has
fallen to record lows.)
Quality? (Physician groups have
improved their quality performance, hospitals continue to increase their scores on
quality and
patient safety metrics, and even Medicare Advantage quality has been
climbing steadily.)
The cost of the law relative to projections when it passed? (Cheaper--exchange subsidies paid out in FY14 were about
31% lower than the price tag "sold" back in 2010, in large part because premiums are lower than they were expected to be).
So which objective measure of the health care system is the problem for you?
Has the rate of uninsured dropped? If it hasn't yet, then it will because Medicaid has been greatly expanded. And it's now actually illegal to be uninsured, so there's also that. Get insurance or get a series of escalating fines in the mail. Nice!
The deficit? Let me put it this way; Let's say I make $50,000 a year. I begin to spend $5,000 a day which is way beyond my means. I cut back to spending
only $2,500, reducing my annual deficit by a whopping 50%. Wow! Impressive. But let's not kid ourselves, I'm still living way beyond my means. And let's not kid ourselves over the national deficit. The sheer insanity of the Bush/Obama $1.5 trillion deficit makes the current deficit look reasonable, by comparison. That's all.
On a per capita basis, healthcare costs continue to grow. "
Per capita health care costs have been rising at just under 3 percent a year over the last four years, but that’s less than half the average annual growth in the preceding eight years. Economists say the recession is the biggest reason for the dip — though many also credit the ACA for a bit of the decline."
ACA Impact on Per Capita Cost of Health Care
We had a lot of inflation under Bush. Food, fuel and health care costs rose dramatically. Then we had a financial crash, and a great recession, and accordingly inflation has been very minimal under Obama. If the economy starts to pick up again, that will translate to a return to rapidly escalating health care costs.
And really, when this thing does take hold and everyone is caught in its web, who is to say what insurance companies will charge, or what the quality metrics will say, or what the burden will be on taxpayers when the burden of cost shifts to the states, or what the cost of the law will be after a massive expansion of Medicaid for the poor at the very time when Baby Boomers are going on Medicare by the thousands per day?
Generally speaking, the American people are sensible. They'll see the ACA for what it is, and how it was sold. I lot of Bush supporters changed their minds about the Iraq war, and how it was sold. A lot of Obama supporters will eventually change their minds about the ACA.
