Well, I suspect that Obamacare will eventually be a political winner with the voters the dems have to have: the blue collar. I put up a link last week to the strange flip with the gop attracting the less educated whites, but they are declining as a % of the electorate, and there may be race component there as well.
I think the below WSJ link is correct in that the effect of Obamacare will be a "two-tier" system. However, I'm not sure what that really means, because Germany has a base insurance for the less well employed, and better and more individual choice packages for others. France is moving there. I think Sweden and Poland are either there or moving. We didn't choose the Canadian model. Further, there's an irony in the gop decrying a two tier system in that we CHOOSE to not do a damn thing while instead invading a camelshit third world country. Futher, the angst of existing docs not taking Medicaid patients is a bit of fear mongering, since part of obamacare is educating more primary care docs. Of course a lot of bright kids who wanted to go to med school to be highly paid specialists, bailed out into other careers, because they didn't want to treat the great unwashed masses.
Still, instead of expanding Medicaid, I wish we'd have just raised taxes on HC providers and Insurors to give people w/o HC tax credits to use to buy HC insurance, which would then in turn have given the providers and insurors more customers with which they could have "recaptured" their tax hikes.
Scott W. Atlas: The Coming Two-Tier Health System - WSJ.com
With the Affordable Care Act, the government has dramatically expanded its authority as final arbiter over health insurance and consequently over access to medical care. After the law's Medicaid expansion and with the population aging into Medicare eligibility, the 107 million under Medicaid or Medicare in 2013 will skyrocket to 135 million five years later, growing far faster than the ranks of the privately insured.
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David Klein
Add to that centralization of power the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), ObamaCare's group of political appointees tasked with reducing payments to doctors and hospitals. Even Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warned that "The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them."
The hidden truth is just around the corner—those more dependent on public insurance, mostly the poor and middle class, will have limited access to medical care. About one-third of primary-care physicians and one-fourth of specialists have already completely closed their practices to Medicaid patients. Over 52% of physicians have already limited the access that Medicare patients have to their practices, or are planning to, according to a 2012 survey by Merritt Hawkins for the Physicians Foundation. More doctors than ever already refuse Medicaid and Medicare due to inadequate payments for care, and that trend will only accelerate as government lowers reimbursements.
