We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, August 21, 2016

The Obamacare Death Spiral

Click here to access article from The Polemicist.

He addresses the reasons why major insurers such as United Health, Aetna, and Humana are dropping out of the Affordable Care Act. It appears that they are not making enough money.
...the insurance companies and the business press focus on what was always the real measure of Obamacare’s success: whether it can provide sufficient profitability. The defection of large insurers means that Obamacare is failing in this, always its prime, objective, and, as Sally C. Pipes puts it, for CNBC: the "death spiral" has arrived. It is not—It was never going to be!—the objections of liberal or conservative critics, but the objections, and ultimately the withdrawal, of its founding business partners, that would put an end to Obamacare. The point of this program is to allow the private health insurance companies to make more profits. If they don’t, it fails, in its own real capitalistic (as opposed to its ostensible humanitarian) terms. That day has come.