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Good column on the ACA and why Dems need to help fix it

Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:36 pm
by 133743Hokie
Good article about how good leaders use experimentation to ascertain success or failure, recognize failure, and work to improve it or abandon and move on. Some key paragraphs from the article (below) sum it up nicely...
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"It’s hard to admit you were wrong. Democrats are going to need some help with that.

What’s too often lost in the Sturm und Drang of recent Republican efforts to reform the insurance reforms enacted by Democrats in 2009 is this: The Affordable Care Act has not worked as advertised. That is the fundamental fact around which the debate should be organized. The ACA did not result in lower premiums but in the opposite; it did not result in more competitive insurance markets but in the opposite; it did not result in superior health-insurance plans but, at least in many cases, the opposite; it has not resulted in universal coverage. Among the major promises made on behalf of the ACA, only one of any significance has been delivered on: It is the case that more Americans have health insurance today than they did in 2009. But the ACA has under-delivered on that point, too: Only about 16.5 million people — barely 5 percent of the population — gained health coverage from the passage of the ACA through 2016, and the vast majority of those, 81 percent, were new Medicaid beneficiaries.

It does not work.

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid (wherever he is) ought to fess up: They blew it. They got this one wrong. They may have meant well, their hearts may have been in the right place, and they may have given it their best, but they did not achieve their intended outcomes, their heads were . . . somewhere heads don’t belong . . . and their best wasn’t good enough. They were warned, in these pages and elsewhere, but they refused to listen. They should just admit it — doing so would help to clear the way for fixing up what they fouled up. Instead, they are sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “La-la-la! Can’t hear you!” as critics point to imploding health-insurance markets and skyrocketing premiums."

.....

"But whatever else you can say about the politics of health insurance, it remains the fact that the ACA does not work. Even if it were the case that Republicans are mean, wicked, greedy, and ignorant, the ACA does not work. Sure, President Trump is a buffoon and the Republican congressional leadership has been strikingly unpersuasive — but the ACA does not work. Mitch McConnell could be in the employ of Beelzebub himself and the ACA still does not work. In a house or with a mouse, on a train or in the rain, the ACA does not work. It does not do what its authors promised it would do. And it has failed mostly for the reasons that conservative critics pointed to at the time.

The Affordable Care Act is the New Coke of Democratic domestic-policy initiatives, the McAfrika sandwich (“based on an authentic African recipe”), the Clairol Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. You know what all those products have in common? They’re gone. But the Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, and Procter & Gamble still exist. They’re doing okay. They understood their failures, fixed them, and moved on to better and more profitable things. Eventually, we’re going to have to do the same thing when it comes to health insurance, and the sooner the Democrats get on board the less it is going to hurt.

Admitting that you got it wrong is the first step toward getting it right."

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... re-move-on