How’re we doing?
The national debate has finally changed. Just saying no to Obamacare no longer seems a viable solution for its opponents. “Just saying no and doing nothing in return is a recipe for disaster,” Forbes blogger Avik Roy (who also writes for National Review) advised a couple of months ago. “First of all, our healthcare entitlements continue to grow unabated, and solutions to this problem are even more urgent today than they were yesterday,” Roy wrote. “Second, the growing unaffordability of healthcare is one of the biggest challenges facing lower-and-middle-income Americans…The rising cost of health insurance is the reason that middle-class wages have been stagnant for a decade.”
With 15 per cent of Americans lacking health insurance and many more teetering on the edge of losing their coverage, voters with insecure health insurance are a huge political constituency. What Republican policies are directly targeted to this group? “If you are a voter who will get subsidized insurance under Obamacare in 2014,” Roy asked rhetorically, “will you vote for someone in 2016 who seeks to take those subsidies away without a better solution in their place?”
In recent weeks, the RAND Corporation, which had previously published a study predicting great healthcare savings, issued an assessment which made the network television news. Digital health records won’t create the kind of cost savings predicted in the earlier RAND study until the technology is far more widespread and is being used to its full potential, a pair of RAND researchers concluded. “We’ve not achieved the productivity and quality benefits that are unquestionably there for the taking,” said Dr. Arthur Kellermann, one of the recent study’s authors.
Late last month Brookings healthcare expert Henry J. Aaron wrote a piece warning that the political storms over healthcare reform were far from over. He claimed not to be the partisan of either the pessimistic or the optimistic view. “The major challenge will be to make sure that the system works in enough places and fast enough to permit supporters to point to the successes and explain that the inevitable glitches are reparable,” Aaron wrote. “It is also worth noting that were Congress not neck-deep in a swamp of partnership legislators could find ways to minimize the problems that remain.”
It helps to have a long view. Remember all the economic studies of the 1970 and 1980s that failed to find productivity improvements due to investments in computers and in information technology? Most economists have attributed the unexpected spurt in the nation’s productivity growth rate in the 1990s to the investment of the previous decades.
