With Obamacare sure to be repealed by President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, it's worth considering what Obamacare's legacy will be: a demonstration of both the folly of health care reforms that preserve the profit motive or emulate free markets, as well as the urgent need for single payer.
Before we take each of Obamacare's fundamental failures in turn, it's worth pointing out that--not only would single payer have avoided all of the failures of Obamacare, but it would have cost far, far less. I've
covered at length the mammoth inefficiencies of Obamacare, the American health care system generally, and any market-based system for social welfare provision, in comparison to slim and efficient universal social welfare systems like single payer.
Failure #1: Uninsurance
The biggest goal of health care reform was to reduce the United States' massive uninsurance rate, a problem without parallel in the developed world.
Yet Obamacare was never intended to be a universal health care system. The framers of Obamcare
intended to leave a large portion of Americans without health insurance. I've
written at length about how Obamacare was expected to--at best--only cut in half the uninsurance rate. There's no need to rehash these arguments here.
But
as President Obama himself acknowledged in an article he wrote for the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Obamacare failed to even cut the uninsurance rate in half; it was reduced from 16% in 2010 when the law was passed to 9% in 2015:
Since the Affordable Care Act became law, the uninsured rate has declined by 43%, from 16.0% in 2010 to 9.1% in 2015, primarily because of the law’s reforms.
There's not really anything else to say here. Single payer would have achieved a 0% uninsurance rate.
As Obama himself said in 2009, nearly a year before he signed Obamacare into law,
I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is that unless you have what's called a single-payer system in which everybody is automatically covered, then you're probably not going to reach every single individual.
Obamacare failed on uninsurance, but, then again, it never really set out to succeed.
Failure #2: Underinsurance
In a critique of Obama's JAMA article, Adam Gaffney
notes:
One issue Obama does briefly address is the frequently heard critique
that the ACA has bolstered the rise of health-care cost-sharing: the
payment due at point of use that includes things like copayments,
deductibles, and coinsurance. High cost-sharing means the underinsured
frequently avoid going to needed doctor’s appointments, having important
tests run, or even visiting the emergency room. When they do, they are often left with punishing bills.
While admitting that deductibles have been rising,
Obama asserts that the rate of increase has not changed. But he misses
the point: the argument isn’t that the ACA created “underinsurance”
— it’s that it didn’t reduce it, much less eliminate it, which should be our real goal.
Not much more to say here either. Single payer would have reduced the underinsurance rate to 0% instead of continuing the trend of shifting more and more of the cost of health care upon ordinary Americans.
Failure #3: Only government insurance was effective
Obamacare expanded insurance in two ways--a boring way, and a sexy, innovative way.
The boring way was simply allowing more people to enroll in Medicaid.
The sexy, innovative way was giving people who couldn't get health insurance through their employer (or through the government) a cash subsidy to purchase private health insurance. This caused significant buzz in 2009, because--in theory--once ordinary people were able to afford coverage for themselves and their family, they would be empowered to choose the private insurance plan that was right for them. In this way, Obamacare was supposed to harness the power of free markets to reduce
health insurance costs. When people could purchase the best plans for
the lowest cost, those insurers would be rewarded with more customers
and their competitors would be forced to improve their products or else go
out of business for want of customers.
This system of subsidies for beneficiaries and competition for private plans was called the Health Care Exchanges, which were most famously accessible online through a state Exchange (like NY State of Health, KYnect, etc), or the federal Exchanges (healthcare.gov) for residents of states that did not set up a state Exchange.
Which was better?
Boring old Medicaid or the innovative Exchanges?
While considerable attention has been paid to the exchanges, they have so far contributed only modestly to the aggregate increase in coverage—accounting for 11 percent of the 8.38 million-person net increase in health insurance enrollment during the first three quarters of 2014. The other 89 percent of net enrollment growth during that period came from the expansion of Medicaid.