Saturday, February 09, 2013

ACA available at your grocer! Not to receive, but to pay for...

ACA was supposed to save money.  That was never possible, of course, and people who favored it on that ground were pretty dumb.

But the magnitude, and actual form, of the increased costs....THAT is surprising.  You will seen get a chance to pay for ACA at the grocery store.

The point is that we'd be better off with single-payer, by a lot.  ACA is about the worst outcome imaginable. I'd like to think the ACA supporters knew that all along, and were trying to get single-payer as a result.  But instead I expect us to be stuck with ACA for...a long time.

To be fair, there is nothing wrong with ACA, if you are an insurance company or big pharma.  Since those guys own the Democratic party, they wrote the legislation.  But for doctors and patients, ACA is going to be a nightmare.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Actually the insurance companies got bait and switched. Not that I'm sympathetic to them, but they thought they were getting a bunch of new customers from the individual mandate. Now that's largely been defanged, I expect they're going to be in real trouble as they're forced to offer insurance to anyone at capped prices, but can't depend on a huge volume of cost-free young subscribers complying with the mandates.

Jimbo said...

Clicking thru from your link to the source, I found that the gigantic increase in costs--as estimated by the grocery & restaurant lobby--is $1 billion. (The cost is due to nutritional-info labeling, which presumably is closer to a fixed cost than a variable one, but let's leave that aside).

If this cost were to fall entirely on grocery stores (as opposed to restaurants), and if it were an annual cost (which it's not), it would raise grocery stores' costs by 0.17%.

I don't like the ACA at all, but this particular aspect of it is an absurd thing to shriek about.