Time to scrap Obamacare and find something that works

By DOUG THOMPSON - A Capitol Hill Blue Commentary
November 13, 2013

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The Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare and once considered the President’s signature accomplishment, is now the latest example of inept administration, flawed policy and glaring failure.

“It’s an albatross that not only hangs around the neck of President Obama, but one that looms as a Scarlett Letter for any Democrat running for office in 2014,” Democratic political strategist Arnold Block tells Capitol Hill Blue.

With increasing problems and security threats, the troubled HealthCare.gov web site now stands as the poster child for a President who, more and more, just can’t seem to do anything right.

And while former President Bill Clinton leads a growing list of Democrats who want at least a delay in implementation of the flawed program, which is scheduled to become effective Jan. 1, other members of the party of the donkey talk privately among themselves and express the once never-considered thought within their ranks that Obamacare may need to be scrapped so the party and the nation can move on.

“Yes, there in talk within the walls that the Affordable Care Act is not ready for prime time and may never be what we thought it could be,” a senior White House aide told me privately this week.

More and more, it appears he could be right. Obamacare is not what the President promised when he mesmerized a nation looking for bright new leadership. It is a law written by health care lobbyists — the same kind of lobbyists that Obama promised would never be part of his administration.

It became more and more of an impossible to implement law as the White House allowed crippling compromises to get it passed and those changes turned the law into a mystifying piece of legislation that defied logic — as demonstrated every day by the mounting list of problems surrounding HealthCare.gov and the broken Obama promise that Americans could keep their existing health insurance if they desired.

Former President Clinton is urging Obama to back changes in the law that would stop tens of millions of Americans from losing their existing health plans. Obama is stubbornly refusing.

Other Democrats want, as the very least, a delay in the requirement that Americans be on board with Obamacare or have some other form of health insurance by March 1 or face a penalty. Obama is resisting that as well.

The few who have managed to work their way through the flawed Obamacare system often find themselves suffering “sticker shock,” with premium prices are far more than they can afford to pay along with castigating restrictions that will keep them from qualifying for the subsidies necessary to pay for the insurance.

“We seeing one nightmore after another and this is turning into a horror story that never ends,” says former White House aide Ken Larstrom. “The Affordable Care Act is becoming the signature of a failed Presidency.”

Republicans came under fire for demanding delays or complete defunding of the Affordable Care Act as a condition for avoiding the 16-day government shutdown in October. Now, public sentiment appears to be growing to taking another look at Obamacare and, perhaps, accepting the fact that it is a failed law that should be scrapped.

As more and more problems emerge from the law that never deserved the term “reform,” it is more and more obvious that Obamacare is a law that can not work.

More importantly, it is a law that should be recognized as a mistake and scrapped before it does even more damage to an already-hobbled American health care system.

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Copyright © 2013 Capitol Hill Blue

The law doesn't start until January 1, 2014. How can something be deemed to be a failure and require scraping if it hasn't started yet?

The cost of indigent medical care is being absorbed right now by the hospitals and clinics that are obligated by state law to provide emergent and life-saving humanitarian medical care. Such episodic and incomplete healthcare interventions are partly to blame for the stratospheric expensively disastrous costs incurred, everyday.

It’s incredible that we, as a nation, cannot clearly agree on the advantages of having a maximally healthy and fully productive population of us all through judicious management of healthcare cost allocation.

Yeah, let's do that. Let's find "something" that works. In the meantime, let's just scrap it and return to the good ol' days when insurance companies never raised their rates, never dropped "sick" customers, and welcomed all regardless of pre-existing conditions with truly affordable insurance.

Yeah, let's scrap it. My 23 and 25 year old sons can go back to being uninsured. And the tens of thousands (or is it now hundreds of thousands) of the poor and near poor ( and in most instances, the working poor) and veterans who now have access to insurance through expanded Medicaid can go back to the "just hurry up and die" Republican plan - or go to the ER and let the rest of us pay for it. And you wouldn't know it by reading the stories of cancelled policies and sticker shock reported in the MSM, but there have been many, many stories of people and families who have been able to sign up for truly affordable health insurance on the state run exchanges as well as on the flawed federal exchange. But to learn about those, you might have to wade into the diaries of real people on the "lefty blogs" and even on the not so "lefty blogs." But, oh heavens, those people are PARTISANS, and one might have to shower if exposed to their experiences.

Replace it with "something"? With what? Medicare or Medicaid for all? Or some form of single-payer that other First World nations use? Sure, works for me. It would be simpler, cheaper, and fairer. And that will pass Congress...sure it will. The POTUS chose the option that did the least to upset the status quo, that allowed the health insurance companies, who add zero value to our health care system, to continue to reap profits, that had its roots in conservative think tanks...and the Republicans have opposed it at every step of the way. Scrapping it and replacing it with "something" just means scrapping it and replacing it with nothing. And you know that's true.

Good thing that this defeatist attitude didn't win the day when Massachusetts reformed its health care system. MA had similar problems when it launched its reform...and they fixed it. I understand MA residents are for the most part very happy with it.

I understand that seniors like Medicare D. Go back and look at the news reports of the rollout of that program. It was glitch after glitch after glitch. But it was fixed...with a lot of help from the very same Democrats who voted against it. (I'm also glad that the "hand wringing" approach to problem solving didn't rule the day when our three astronauts were "stranded" in space during Apollo 13).

I'm not surprised at this column. After all, it provides the author an opportunity to write about failure. And it has the added benefit of advocating more failure, which will give him another opportunity to again write about failure six months down the road.

This idea does reflect the dominant American mindset that you can judge product quality and value according to how well the company's website works.

You can also get the best and most dependable information from the slickest political ad campaigns.



I'm all for finding a better way to implement a sane healthcare system. How about we find something that works better and then scrap the ACA?

Limbaugh does not have insurance and it works for him ... I therefore propose no one have insurance

problem solved

Sounds like a good idea to me

Ironically once the aca gets going
There will be many people with insurance who will lose that insurance during the period Doug proposes to scrap the aca and wait for a better idea to emerge.

That is the idea, right?

It is not "obvious" to me that the law cannot work. Perhaps Doug should elaborate on his meaning. It cannot work to precent the insurance companies from refusing to write policies on people who have pre existing conditions... or it is better from Doug's view that we do return to that condition where people who actually needed insurance were unable to get that insuraunce? That arrangement is presumably a less hobbled health care system? I am just trying to follow your thoughts here Doug.

As I understand it, Doug is proposing that we should return to the better way of doing things where less affluent people did not have health care and would be treated in the ER.... that is your idea, correct?

Or maybe you do not like the way things were.... but you think that we should return to that previous arrangement unless and until the nation unifies behind some "better" plan at some point in the future?

It seems to me that a more sensible approach would be to start developing fixes to the ACA that address each of the problems you see as horrible flaws. And since we know that you are saying that presenting a entire new replacement plan will be an obvious process.... it should also be obviously easy to pass temporary fixes to the ACA pending the release of the Doug Thompson plan to fix heal care.... a plan that I am sure will fit neatly onto a single double spaced page so everyone can read and understand it. Because, we all know that the solutions to these problems are so blindingly obvious and simple.

The Democrats tried doing something better with wanting a single payer system. Guess who put the kibosh on that?

They also tried with the public option. Guess who put the kibosh on that.
But sure, let's all blame it on Obama, because after all, it's Obamacare, right?

Let's forget all about the 2009 Summer of Town Hall Anger, the series of events which gave me a lifetime's worth of memories and video footage, some of which aired on the news, most of which was apparently deemed "too controversial" by our "liberal" media.

Let's forget about all the Congress critters, Republican and Democrat alike, who each wanted a little piece of the law or they'd take their marbles and go home. Folks like Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman (who singlehandedly killed the public option by caucusing and voting with the Republicans while his wife sat on the board of directors of the Susan G. Komen Foundation), and the veritable sky high mountain of think tanks, public policy institutes, litigation centers, PAC's and the endless stream of C Street and K Street lobbyists who all had to have a hand in meddling with reform until it became the sweetheart deal of the century, not for policyholders and uninsured, but for the insurance companies.
(I won't even bother cataloguing all the GOP abuses, they're already legion and legend anywhere you want to look)

And let's forget about the nonstop sabotage that's been going on ever since the GOP-friendly CGI America built the damn website in the first place, after contributing heavily to Republican candidates.

Naaah, none of that had anything to do with it.

I guess my wife and I will start saving for a headstone for our son, because Congress can't even be bothered to address the ACA compliance gap which leaves him uninsured as of his eighteenth birthday despite the ACA allowing service connected disabled parents to keep their kids on their policy till age 26.


There is no way a kid born with five major heart defects will ever get health insurance under the old system.

Those defects are:
1) Transposition of the Great Arteries
2) Double outlet right ventricle
3) Pulmonary stenosis
4) Leaky mitral valve
5) Ventricular septal defect (VSD)

Nope, business as usual...how many times has the House voted to repeal and defund the ACA.

Yeah but it's all Obama's fault.
Nice work, Doug.

My, my, the pro Obamacare folks are all bent out of shape. Kinda reminds me of the stuff that came from the other side when I zeroed in on Bush or some of his actions.

And, yes, I felt it is Obama's fault because he kept giving in on demands made by those determined to weaken the act As I noted: