Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
April 22, 2015 at 02:19 PM
I wrote about the apparent lack of business at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) yesterday, and some readers had a good laugh about that program’s problems.
SHOP exchange builders were friendlier to agents and brokers than the builders of the individual exchanges were, but some of the exchange builders were downright nasty.
See also: Vermont comp proposal: $15 per person per month
On the one hand, it’s only human to take joy in rejoicing in exchange problems in beautiful, prosperous, lovely states that produce great ice cream but happen to have treated agents like dirt, or in exchange problems at a mammoth government department that has thrown sand in agent’s eyes by refusing to openly send them the e-mail newsletter sent to nonprofit navigators. Even though, actually, the agents can simply cheat, say they’re navigators, and get the newsletter anyway.
On the other hand: Joy over the downfall of meanies aside, whether PPACA as a law succeeds or fails has nothing to do with whether PPACA has succeeded or failed.
Most people have agreed for decades that the U.S. health care system is expensive, inefficient and unfair. Whether people got wonderful care or no care at all often depended on a roll of the device.
Wildly popular provisions in PPACA that have drawn little criticism from anyone, such as provisions requiring insurers to cover basic childhood immunizations and offer a formal appeals process to enrollees affected by benefits denials, died in the cradle year after year before PPACA came along.
Meanwhile, some major parts of PPACA seem to be a complete mess. The individual public exchange system can, miraculously, help consumers who are desperate for health coverage enroll in almost-free coverage, but it seems as if a consortium of Anthem, UnitedHealth, Aetna, Humana, Health Net, Kaiser and a few big nonprofit plans and Web brokers could probably do the same job better and have money left over to send the enrollers on great incentive trips to Hawaii.
