Amongst all the stories about the roll out of the Affordable Care Act, Michael Lind from Salon had this great write up in last Monday's issue about what the right might be missing from all of this. I know shock that we have the right not thinking things through but please dear reader, read on.
Here is his article from SALON if you want to read up on it on your own.
http://www.salon.com/...
He takes from a blog at the Roosevelt Institute by Mike Konzcal that goes really into it in a more detailed way. Here is the link to his post.
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/...
Lind and Konzcal makes these two points.
1. Because of all the information that we have to enter to get matched up with insurance and with subsidy information, the snafus were bound to happen. Lets make this like Social Security and Medicare, and the likely hood of the epic snafus that we are having may not have come to pass. You have to move information through a whole lot of hubs where a person has to connect with IRS, DHS, Social Security, and other agencies before you even get to the part of shopping for insurance, this might move people off of it and cause more problems.
But his second point and I think the most important one is this and this is what the GOP is missing through all of this either through sheer stupidity or hoping no one will notice it.
2. The crown jewel of the GOP is to move the country off of Social Security and Medicare and put them into a private marketplace model and not one of public distribution that we have now. But to do this, they have to create a market place to sell these products, retirement or medical insurance, give incentives for people to purchase products on the private market place, and allow for states to create these products to match there particular citizens needs. Does this sound familiar...ITS THE SAME MODEL FOR THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT. The Congressional GOP is mocking this as a failure of the government and that the free market system will rule for ETERNITY HA HA HAH A HAHAHAHA. But some conservatives are freaking out about this.
Konzcal and other point out that Paul Ryan's plan for medicare and social security will require a marketplace with the same programs in place like the ACA in order for his plan to work. If people have a problem with this, what do you think will happen when they try it with Social Security and Medicare.
Konzcal and Ross Douthat also smartly point out that if you were to remove all the middle man, ie the states that are going out of the way to make things hard for the feds to implement ACA, you could get a better product. In other words MEDICARE FOR ALL, which we have all been saying for how long.
I await the comments below.