Obamacare fail won’t fix system

Published 8:52 pm Saturday, October 26, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

  1. Appeals court rejects Texas doctor’s challenge to Affordable Care Act

Republicans are reveling in the Affordable Care Act’s disastrous rollout. Computer “glitches” have made enrolling almost impossible. Throughout the week, the news kept getting worse for Obamacare.

But that’s a dangerous distraction. Technical glitches can be fixed. Within a few months, if not weeks, the Obamacare website will be up and running. What Republicans should be focused on now is coming up with a viable alternative to the Affordable Care Act, should that legislation indeed prove to be in a “death spiral,” as at least one pundit has said.

Because merely scrapping Obamacare won’t fix anything. It will still leave the U.S. with an increasingly unworkable model for health care — employer-based insurance.

When the job numbers came out last week, a far more important figure was included — but largely overlooked by the GOP. More than 90 million Americans who are of working age aren’t in the workforce.

“It is true that unemployment has slowly dropped from a peak of 10 percent in late 2009, to 7.3 percent at present,” reported The Economist. “But this decline overstates the health of the jobs market. The labor-force participation rate, the share of the working-age population either working or looking for work, has plunged from 66 percent in 2007 to 63.2 percent in August, a 35-year low.”



What’s more, as many as 20 percent of today’s workers could be retired in five years. We have graying population, and fewer and fewer workers of all ages.

“A job used to be the next step after a diploma,” CNN notes. “But now, young people aren’t in any rush to start working. Less than 78 percent of people aged 20 to 34 either have jobs or are looking for work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from the peak of 83 percent in 2000, and the lowest since the 1970s.”

We’ve long known what this means for Medicare and Social Security; fewer workers paying into the system, and more seniors drawing from it make for some disturbing math.

But what do the labor force participation rates mean for Obamacare? Not much, really — the ACA already expands Medicaid to cover more people, and offers subsidies to “working poor” Americans to help them purchase insurance.

But the labor force participation rates do have important implications for the U.S. health care system after Obamacare (should that legislation implode). Returning to the system we have before simply won’t work. Employer-based insurance, which used to cover all but the poor and elderly, won’t cover nearly enough Americans. That’s because not enough Americans are actually employees anymore.

So what’s next? If Republicans don’t have a Plan B, the Democrats surely do. Single-payer health care has long been the real goal of the left. The model, cited by Democrats such as Rep. Bernie Sanders, is Medicare itself — a hugely popular (though financially unsound) system that would simply be expanded to include all Americans.

If the web launch is any indication, then Obamacare might actually fail.

But the GOP had better be ready with an alternative.