There has been a great deal of introspection among leading Democrats after the bruising defeat in the last election — much of its directed at the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare.” It has ranged from Schumer’s view that the law was political blunder to Harkin’s view that it was a poorly drafted mistake. This week, the highest ranked Democrat, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, said that the Obama Administration may have doomed Democrats in Congress with its poor management and blunders in the rollout of the program. Now the person ultimately responsible for that mismanagement and failure, former Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has her own prognosis: bad brand name.
At the time of the failed rollout, I believed that the most obvious response was at a minimum to fire Sebelius, the subject of a past column. However, the Administration and Democrats circled the wagons and Sebelius kept her job.
Now Sebelius explained on Wednesday that “Obamacare, no question, has a very bad brand that has been driven intentionally by a lot of misinformation and a lot of paid advertising.” I would not say that, after hundreds of millions of wasted dollars and hundreds of “fixes” to a poorly drafted law, the problem is the name. However, it reminded me of a story that I heard while attending the University of Chicago. This may be apocryphal but it is too good a story to check as they say. The story goes that Coca Cola was struggling with loss of market share against 7UP due to the appeal of the “uncola” in the anti-establishment environment of the 60s. So the giant corporation hired a counterculture icon from the University of Chicago (Severn Dardan is often named). The story goes that the cultural guru disappeared with a huge upfront fee to “study” the issue until the company demanded that he appear at a board meeting to give his recommendations for the future Coca Cola. The man walked into the board room in overalls and simply said “change the name” and walked out.
Now, while the hippy story may not pan out, I have an easy substitute from Sebelius. Just change the name. Problem solved.
Source: Politico
Sebelius will have to rule out “Enhanced Health Care Techniques” (EHCT) since that tag has likely been reserved already by CIA contract physicians.
While all the idealist, “everybody else does it” supporters of “Single Payer” go on and on and on about the blah, blah, blah …
Obamacare killed every hope for Single Payer for decades. No one will buy the argument that the government was mistaken when they promised a health care miracle with Obamacare. Supporters: “yeah, they lied, cheated and stole to get Obamacare passed and implemented; but, NOW we have a better idea; really; no kidding; if you hated Obamacare, you’ll love Single Payer.”
Wasting your breath trying to convince anyone that Single Payer is the answer. Obamacare poisoned the well for any government-supported health care reform.
Government is supposed to handle the stuff that is universal: the military, imagine a free enterprise military, highways, airports, healthcare, etc.
Food is universally consumed. Somehow we get plenty from greedy farmers.
Government is supposed to handle the stuff that provides substantial benefits to many people other than the ones who might buy it. Standard examples are the military and the criminal justice system.
The treatment and control of very dangerous infectious diseases also falls into that category, as does basic research. However, diagnosis and treatment of disease do not fall into this category. That’s why the more-or-less private US system has delivered the highest quality of treatment in the world, controlling for the unhealthy US lifestyle.
Also not requiring gov’t provision are airports, btw. For example, Heathrow and 3 other airports in the UK are operated by private firms. Quite a few other countries have also privatized their airports.
Chip S.:
There are 27% more lawyers than doctors in the U.S. as of 2012 (1.2 million and 945,000 respectively). So what’s your point?
issac – “Pogo
The liberty of a few to retain a system that costs everyone more is not liberty it is oligarchy. Something like the government of this country. If the facts were made known and the options presented, ah but then this is the US.”
The answer to more liberty isn’t a system that gives you less liberty. It’s really quite simple. You’ve already admitted that we don’t have a free market system in healthcare and yet you blame the free market. You don’t make sense. I think you are the one “in step”.
issaac, Car insurance is in the free market. Health insurance is not.
“Government is supposed to handle the stuff that is universal: the military, imagine a free enterprise military, highways, airports, healthcare, etc.”
I have imagined it and I’ve seen it, it is great. My brother is a PE civil engineer and he always tells me that nothing slows a project down like the DOT. In our small town, a private business just built a new road across our creek to relieve their large truck traffic interfering with traffic (They did it with their own money) and it literally took them about a month to do it. If it was the county, they’d still be trying to decide what shovel to stand and hold. Also, every one of those items you list would be run more efficiently with in the free market. I might be wrong but the military is the only one that the govt. is supposed to do. You also forgot in your list the USPS which runs billions in the red every year. Does Fed Ex or UPS?
Here’s my question to you, when the govt. has a monopoly, who is left to protect you from them?
Pogo
The liberty of a few to retain a system that costs everyone more is not liberty it is oligarchy. Something like the government of this country. If the facts were made known and the options presented, ah but then this is the US.
Or in other words what we know is from the newspapers:
dog bites man equals lawyer screws client
man bites dog equals doctor screws patient
Chip
That’s because any idiot can become a lawyer. To be doctor you need more of everything. If you look at the percentages of lawyers that go on to become vacuous tools without integrity or a thought to call their own, it is much much higher. Doctors condemn themselves to a life of service for very good pay and when they do fall make the loudest sound. Most lawyers don’t have very far to fall.
Once the fed. gov. takes over, healthcare will be run on the strictest standards of efficacy.
Liedrkranz by any other name would still smell like Liederkranz.
issac – “We all need health care. We all end up paying one way or another.”
Really? How do you know that? I remember in my 20’s not needing any health care. In fact I really don’t need it know that I’m older. I need insurance in case something happens to me but that is about it. I sure wish I could have put all that money I wasted in my 20’s into an HSA account for later use. But that goes against your redistribution system. Everyone really needs food, should we steal even more property from others to give away in the form of foodcare or should it be Obamafood?
Jim 22
Government is supposed to handle the stuff that is universal: the military, imagine a free enterprise military, highways, airports, healthcare, etc.
It’s a monopoly when the law and/or circumstances dictate that you must have something but it is left up to global conglomerates to peg the price, make the profits when there shouldn’t really be any. If the government made it the law that in order to drive a car, which is optional but almost always necessary, you had to have insurance, couldn’t drive without insurance, possibly not be able to get to work, etc and then they left it to the private sector to sell the insurance, administer the insurance, etc. why we would all be paying 20% to 25% more than they do in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, etc where the provincial government administers the system. Is that what you want?
We own several Apple products. We could buy other brands but we prefer Apple. When we buy Apple, we support shareholders, hundreds of thousands of workers from manufacturing in China to R & D in Silicon Valley. This is our choice.
When you buy health insurance you support shareholders, thousands of corporate salaries in the millions per year, three to four hundred thousand subsidized jobs, etc. etc etc.
If what it means to be American revolves around choice and we do live in a society that is a combination of the I and the We, then why can’t we have the We take care of the We and the I take care of the I in the appropriate places. We are simply a lesser evolved society.
When Nixon was President he was inches away from proposing to change the health care insurance conditions in the US, which were at the time fractured and problematic, to a universal system modeled on the system found in Canadian provinces. He had the support of both the Democratic as well as Republican parties. Unfortunately he messed himself before he could present the obvious solution to a problem that has evolved into such a cancer on the American society that we are simply too afraid to act in fear of killing the patient.
The key difference is liberty, which is limited or abolished by single payer.
Chip
I don’t have the time either but the bottom line is that we all pay regardless of how. The system run by the sacred private enterprise, for profit, parasites are feeding on this fact. We all need health care. We all end up paying one way or another. The single payer system with an added option for extras has been proven and continues to be proven as the most economical. Deductibles are lower or non existent. Emergencies are handled no less professionally than in the US. If the faults peculiar to the single payer system are compared to the faults in the US system they are numerically fewer per capita. Faults exist in all systems.
Regarding the military. My Dad is a WW2 vet, Canadian Navy, at 87 yrs had a mild stroke. He was immediately admitted to emergency, assessed and taken care of. The doctor explained it was a very mild stroke the damage of which would probably show up later in life and at the end of the day when he was tired, nothing to worry about. My Dad was a little shook up so the doctor kept him, “until he makes a nuisance of himself” as he explained to me over the phone when I asked why he was still in the hospital after a week. Dad started to become a nuisance after two weeks and they threw him out. So, you want more stories?
Like I said, the only boy in step.
issac, “Regarding competition, you both need to put on the old thinking caps. There isn’t any. In the US there are approximately 1,200 private insurance companies which are part of a network of the ones we recognize: Aetna, Blue Cross, Humana, etc. These few dozen major marks are in turn underwritten or insured by a handful of global conglomerates such as Lloyds, Aig, and others in Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, and Canada. These underwriters set the premiums as they eventually pay the costs. The typical American perception of competition making things better does not apply to all things. Those aspects of society that all are obligated to participate in are usually better handled by the government.”
To me it looks like you are admitting that what we had and have is not free market and yet you for some reason blame the free market. So we have a bad non free market solution currently and your answer is to make it more of a govt. monopoly. No thanks. Govt. is supposed to protect us from monopolies, not become on.
At a minimum, if the administration can’t build a running website, why should we believe they can build a running single payer system handling 1/6th of the entire economy?
More, how can we so entrust them, when their leaders now tell us the main problem with Obamacare is its name?
Factoid of the Day: There are 23% more lawyers than doctors among the top 1% of the US income distribution.
I don’t have the time today to re-enact the Great Single-Payer Debate, but I’d like to use one of issac’s data points to illustrate the problem w/ measuring the “cost” of healthcare. issac said:
Regarding MRI and such, it has been found that hospitals in the US use these devices on the average of 33% of the time. In Canada the use is on average 80% of the time.
The way to get utilization rates really high is to keep capacity low relative to demand–i.e., to ration access through queuing. In general, a reliable way to keep “spending” down is to shift some of the costs onto patients in the form of non-monetary burdens.
Presenting a two-tier system as “intelligent” is, to put it gently, not helpful. What is the standard of care provided by the public tier? That’s the question.
We already have a type of two-tiered system. The public tier is called Medicaid.
One more thing, to anyone arguing for single-payer on the basis of “reduced administrative costs” I assign this topic: The VA healthcare system: discuss.
This does not surprise me either , as this is the administration that values empty words . According to Mr Obama the only problem with him thoroughly enjoying Golf , after having just talked about the beheading tragedy (after having also known that the rescue mission was attempted but failed) , was “optics” and that he is just not good with optics. Really , any chance that it may suggest an inability to be engaged in the present moment and experience true emotions of a decent human being ? People who he selected to run this administration Ofcourse are not very different in the “qualities” that Mr. Obama has never stopped to display himself .