Tom Firey: "Understanding Obamacare's focus on health insurance"

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (often called Obamacare) is lauded as a broad reform of American health care. In fact, PPACA focuses on only one goal: expanding health insurance coverage. It does this, in part, by subsidizing insurance premiums for lower-income households, and by fining people who don’t have coverage and employers that don’t provide it to workers. PPACA largely overlooks other, arguably worse, problems such as the high cost of care and insurance, the financial problems of Medicare and Medicaid, the frequency of iatrogenic (doctor-caused) injury and death, and the utter mess that is medical malpractice.

By THOMAS A. FIREY

January 15, 2013