That’s What I Expect to Happen Under the Democrats
“The nation would then be left with zombie legislation, a program that lives on but works badly, consisting of poorly funded and understaffed state health exchanges, …. clumsily administered subsidies that lead to needless resentment and confusion, and mandates that are capriciously enforced.”
This is actually quite funny. Two health economists predicting the same end result if the other party has its way.
Wake up folks. This is already zombie legislation.
Call it “night of the living leg.”
He is implicitly confirming the crucial point of all opponents to centrally administered health care: that the system’s performance is indelibly tied to the performance of its current [political] administrators.
If you are fully Hayekian, you will say that no administrators, no matter how well-intentioned or knowledgeable possess sufficient knowledge to make the system function well. If your biases are more party-specific than ideological, you think it will work well as long as your party is in control, and poorly when the other party is in control.
It requires denial on massive scale to believe that your party will always be in control, and that it will never alter in its quality. Realizing the impossibility, you should be reticent about committing your life and property, and the lives and properties of others, not to your party — which you trust — but inevitably to your opponents’ party, which you do not trust.
I agree with ThomasL. If success depends on a particular party being in power, then the new health reform will not be successful.
Didn’t Sebelius just grant a waiver on mini med plans at 30 companies and unions, covering more than a million workers? Wasn’t this an obvious political ploy designed to avoid the embarrassment of having MacDonalds and other visible employers ending health insurnce right before an election? Didn’t she leave another million (less visible) people out in the cold, destined to lose their insurance? Isn’t Sebelius a Democrat?
What am I missing?
Zombie legislation is a pretty accurate analogy to describe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) after the November elections. Not dead, but dysfunctional, sluggish, with a voracious appetite for taxpayer (and insurers’). You could also use the analogy of Frankenstein — a barely alive monstrosity, built out of parts not meant to be part the same body. Just imagine the ACA as a lumbering hulk, aimlessly destroying parts of our health care system, while hordes of stakeholders chase it with torches and pitchforks.
Like Dr. Goodman, I believe that the outcomes described by Prof. Aaron will be the same either either Dem or Republican rule.
That is why it is so important for Republicans to keep focused on repeal, and that they remind Americans that every step they take to defang ObamaCare while he is in the White House is only a milestone on the way to repeal.
If they don’t, the Dems will get traction with the message that ObamaCare would work if they were back in charge.