One of the architects of Obamacare, Ezekiel Emanuel, has been busy writing articles touting his new book, and Robert Tracinski has done the dirty work of reading them and giving us a nice summation in What Was the Point of ObamaCare?. (Found at Betsy's Page.) Here's the answer:
Emanuel gives us one big answer to our question. What was the point of ObamaCare, if not to insure the uninsured? To destroy the insurance companies. ...
What is going to replace private health insurance, he says, is something called “accountable care organizations” or ACOs, about which he makes some very glowing and optimistic predictions, which are easy to make because “This health delivery structure is in its infancy,” so nothing has had a chance to go wrong yet.
The ACOs actually sound pretty much like a new and expanded version of the olds HMOs: an insurance company wedded to a network of preferred doctors and hospitals. And of course it will have many of the same problems.
Barack Obama told us early on that he intended to fundamentally change America as we knew it. Left unsaid was that the change would probably hurt more people than it helped. But what's amazing is that so many people voted for him not once but twice.
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