Obama was wrong to mislead people but right to scrap dysfunctional insurance products.
Flawed though it may turn out to be, Obamacare, as the Affordable Care Act is popularly known, could fundamentally change the relationship between working Americans and their government. This could pose an existential threat to the small-government credo that has defined the G.O.P. for four decades.
For 40 years, many economists' have promoted increasing cost sharing through higher copayments and deductibles, the replacement of fee-for-service payment systems with capitation as in Health Maintenance Organizations, and competition where multiple insurers offer a variety of plans catered to individual consumer's interests and in competition with each other. These practices have produced the worst of all worlds, rising costs along with restrictions on access.
Vermont's aggressive health care reform initiatives can serve as a roadmap for other states, according to Laura Grubb, a Master of Public Health candidate at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). "Vermont is progressive," said Grubb, also a fellow in adolescent medicine at the UTHealth Medical School. "They didn't wait until each step of the Affordable Care Act had to be implemented. They voted on their own state-based reform system."
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