Health Care (ACA) Exchanges Bring Chaos to States

As far as I can see, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that is coming to every house hold in in this country is a complete disaster. The ACA is so invasive and so huge, it makes the other out of control mandates, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid look positively benign, which by the way, are trillions of dollars under funded.

Stop for a few seconds and consider, the ACA will bring trillions of more debt on top of the trillions of debt that we already have plus the trillions of unfunded mandates, just how do you think we will be able to pay for all this new stuff? Can we borrow this much money and not care how or who will repay it? With U6 unemployment set to hit 16%, 24 million unemployed and set to grow to 28 million, who will be able to pay?

What reasoning did the voters use when they voted for Mr Obama to solve our financial problems? He told us he would give us more of the same and yet he was reelected. What in the world were these voters thinking?

Worse case scenario, rather then having to make life changing decisions, they just didn't think at all, it was so much easier to have someone else do the thinking for them and vote out of reflex.

Believe elections do have consequences, and the coming ACA will bring reality to every home in this country. A reality so clear and precise that even the most disengaged among us will not have a problem understanding the catastrophic consequences of this health care nightmare. 

 State Decisions on Health Exchanges: Early Indicators for ObamaCare's Post-Election Health

Source: Thomas P. Miller, "State Decisions on Health Exchanges: Early Indicators for ObamaCare's Post-Election Health," American Enterprise Institute, November 13, 2012.


November 19, 2012
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initially set November 16 as the date for states to decide whether they plan to set up a state-based health benefits exchange in time for initial HHS approval by January 1, 2013. The deadline has since been pushed back to December 14, says Thomas P. Miller of the American Enterprise Institute.

At the moment, it seems a majority of the states will not meet the deadline. This is, in part, due to concerns about the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Indeed, creating functional health benefits exchange under the ACA faces key impediments:

•The ACA is a classic example of a limited, but theoretically good, idea mutating into a politically-driven passage to overregulation, income redistribution and increased dependence on Washington.
•Most states will either refuse to set up their own exchange or prove unable to do so for political and technical reasons.
•The administrative challenge in organizing necessary data stream from multiple venues, creating basically "new" insurance markets, and handling a potential flood of demand for such coverage remains daunting and unprecedented.
•Serious legal questions on the actual authority of federally run exchanges to administer premium subsidies remain unresolved, diluting the power of any arguments that states must set up their own exchanges to avoid losing control.

There are several options state leaders can employ to express their resistance to the ACA.
The first option is "the Pottery Barn Rules" -- meaning, you break it, you buy it.

•This is a passive-aggressive stance that implies that the opposition just stand back and wait for the implosion.
•This, however, is not proactive in solving the problem.

The second option might involve approving different versions of own state-based exchanges that can operate under a market-friendly framework.

•Flexibility, choice and open competition would be more important tools than standardization, selective contracting and compulsion.
•Such exchange-like mechanisms would involve willing consumers, private providers and employer sponsors as partners rather than as subjects.

There's also an intermediate option. It would resist implementation of federally facilitated exchanges while improving bargaining leverage to insist on pro-competition state-designed alternatives.