Important resource: “A Five-Year Assessment of the Affordable Care Act”

International Journal of Health Services
Published online before print February 10, 2015
A Five-Year Assessment of the Affordable Care Act
By John P. Geyman

Abstract

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted in 2010 as the signature
domestic achievement of the Obama presidency. It was intended to contain
costs and achieve near-universal access to affordable health care of
improved quality. Now, five years later, it is time to assess its track
record. This article compares the goals and claims of the ACA with its
actual experience in the areas of access, costs, affordability, and
quality of care. Based on the evidence, one has to conclude that
containment of health care costs is nowhere in sight, that more than 37
million Americans will still be uninsured when the ACA is fully
implemented in 2019, that many more millions will be underinsured, and
that profiteering will still dominate the culture of U.S. health care.
More fundamental reform will be needed. The country still needs to
confront the challenge that our for-profit health insurance industry,
together with enormous bureaucratic waste and widespread investor
ownership throughout our market-based system, are themselves barriers to
health care reform. Here we consider the lessons we can take away from
the ACA's first five years and lay out the economic, social/political,
and moral arguments for replacing it with single-payer national health
insurance.

**

Will the ACA be different, and if so, in what ways? And if it won't
work, what next? These are the questions we will deal with in this
article, drawing from my just-published book, How Obamacare Is
Unsustainable: Why We Need a Single Payer Solution for All Americans.
The goals of this article are three-fold: (a) to compare the goals and
claims for the ACA with its actual experience in the areas of access,
costs, affordability, and quality of U.S. health care; (b) to summarize
lessons we can already take away from its first five years; and (c) to
briefly consider economic, social/political, and moral arguments for
replacing the ACA with NHI.

http://joh.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/24/0020731414568505.abstract

Full Text (PDF - 17 pages):
http://joh.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/24/0020731414568505.full.pdf

****


Comment by Don McCanne

In this paper, John Geyman summarizes the content of his important new
book, "How Obamacare Is Unsustainable: Why We Need a Single Payer
Solution for All Americans." It is already clear that the Affordable
Care Act has not and will not provide adequate repairs to our fragmented
and dysfunctional health care system. Rather than inflicting more
suffering by continuing this flawed experiment in health policy, we
should immediately begin the transition to a system that will work - a
single payer national health program.

Both this IJHS article and his book serve as important resources in
educating the nation on why this transition should be initiated as soon
as possible. They should be distributed widely.

The book is available through the PNHP website at this link:

https://org.salsalabs.com/o/307/t/12979/shop/item.jsp?storefront_KEY=1011&t=&store_item_KEY=4888