ACA
for
whom?

August 10, 2015 -- The ACA has delivered substantial benefits for many Americans but the citizenry is not its primary beneficiary. In an excellent article published last month entitled "Wrong Prescription? The failed promise of the Affordable Care Act", Trudy Lieberman in Harpers Magazine reviews what we've learned in the five years since its passage.

"[It] was a canny restructuring of the American health-care marketplace, one that delivered millions of new customers to insurance companies, created new payment mechanisms for hospitals, steered more business to pharmaceutical companies, and dictated expensive, high-tech solutions for a wide range of problems."

Though medical bankruptcies seem likely to diminish, 17 million more (woefully far from all) Americans have health care coverage, no one can now be excluded due to a pre-existing condition, the growth in health-care costs has slowed and, on balance, we seem to be a little better off than without ACA, it is clear that insurers and big pharma -- not health care "consumers" -- are the winners. All that lobbying paid off.

"Because of a failure of nerve and the immense power of health-care stakeholders, the A.C.A. has reinforced and accelerated many of the system�s most toxic features."

We still need single-payer.

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