How About Fixing Things?

The Affordable Care Act survived another challenge yesterday, but while I believe it is far superior to what the GOP was proposing, it isn't perfect.

It isn't of course in a death spiral, it is going through some adjustments as the markets try to hit the right levels.

The cost of a policy is simply the estimated cost of services for the group, plus admin and profit divided by the number of customers.  Because of the pent up demand of people with serious health conditions, the amount of care provided per customer was higher than initial estimates, since more healthy people opted not to participate.

Getting them to participate is an important aspect and there are certainly ways to add incentives, but solutions require people working together as opposed to taking stances.

There are some issues in health care that have nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act, such as a shortage of doctors in certain parts of the country or the high cost of prescription medicine.  The first is a problem that we have had for a very long time, and training more doctors or importing more is the obvious solution, the second is a bit more problematic because of how research has to be recovered.

Drug companies incur a lot of cost developing new medicines.  Once a drug is approved, they have a monopoly for as long as the patent lasts, often less than ten years from marketing (patents are applied for early in development, so run during the approval cycle).  The actual cost of producing the drug is often a much smaller amount than the recovery of these costs plus add in the costs of drugs that aren't approved yet.

So they have to charge all of this in the first 10 or so years before the generics enter the market and drive the prices down. 

Increasing doctors, reducing the cost of care and getting young people to sign up are really not political issues, they are issues that benefit all Americans.

What about it?