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April 09, 2013 at 09:24 AM
For New Jersey residents who are timid, recreational campers, camping season is about to start. With camping season comes warnings about bears.
The bears are everywhere, and will eat you, especially if you leave your campsite a mess, according to warning notices plastered on every available campsite surface.
Aside from cleanliness, one of the main defenses against a bear is to bang on a pot. Another helpful tip: Give a bear room to escape from you that doesn’t involve coming toward you and eating you.
To me, it seems as if the strategy of banging on a pot probably would not do much to fix whatever ails the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
But, to me, it does seem as if the strategy of giving the bear a way to escape without eating you is highly relevant to efforts to change PPACA.
I don’t have any professional position on whether PPACA is really good or bad, or whether, generally, it’s being implemented well or poorly. Or whether government should be involved in any way in health care finance or health insurance to start with.
I do have general opinions that market forces are powerful; that capitalism has to compete in the marketplace of ideas, just as companies have to compete with one another; and that, of course, no matter how wonderful a giant piece of legislation could theoretically be, it must, inevitably, have stupendous flaws, just because 90 percent of everything human is messed up.
Who is the person who must hate PPACA the most, in the very best-informed detail? Probably Gary Cohen, the director of the Center for Consumer Information & Oversight (CCIIO), or other managers and workers at CCIIO.
Health insurance producers and health insurance company employees simply have to deal with the turmoil and financial devastation that PPACA could possibly cause. Cohen and other folks at CCIIO have to understand every semicolon in the law and take responsibility for trying to make it work, even though they had nothing whatsoever to do with writing it and probably can’t imagine what kinds of lunatics drafted it. And then they have to go out and in public and say all nice things about it, all the time.
