Ideas For Fixing Obamacare: Opening A Conversation

I’m not a healthcare policy expert. Not by a long shot.  The challenges facing healthcare in this country are enormous. While I may not have answers, there is no downside to generating discussion on alternatives.  Feel free to comment on anything you feel is wrong with my suggestion.

The problem legislators are facing in their attempts to “Repeal and Replace” or even modify Obamacare in a manner that will make their constituents happy is that they can’t answer one very important question: “Who takes less?”

The stakeholders in Obamacare are the Insurance Companies, Health Care Providers and Consumers.

Will Insurance Companies be willing to take lower profits?

Will Health Care Providers be willing to charge less for the services they are providing or take less reimbursement?

Will Consumers have to accept fewer services and lesser quality of care?

No stakeholder is willing to take less. Which is why it will be near impossible to “fix Obamacare” in a way that makes consumers, also known as voters, insurers and healthcare providers happy.

Politicians can deflect and promote the benefits of a free market, but the free market shows itself every day in the profits of insurers and healthcare providers. I have yet to see a single public company in these spaces make an announcement that they are willing to or expect to take less because of changes to Obamacare. Have you?

So what should happen?

There are 2 risks that every single citizen of the United States shares:

1. We all can lose the genetic lottery and find ourselves getting seriously ill or worse. 

2. We all can lose the “wrong place, wrong time” lottery and find ourselves facing a significant or life threatening injury.

We all can take steps to reduce those risks, but it is literally impossible to eliminate them. On any given morning, every single person can wake up, feel a little off and soon come to find they are sick.