Consumer Law

Health Care Reform in 2030

By Brian Wolfman

There's no need to work for a single-payer health care system or to worry about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's repeal because Ezra Klein of the Washington Post has written the definitive work on exactly what the health care system will look like in 2030. The current Congress's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act will fail (okay, that's an easy one), and the Supreme Court will uphold the Act's individual mandate. What else? Here's Klein's most playful prophecy:

[I]n 2019, at the urging of President Bobby Jindal, Congress passed the Health Care Equality Act, the third major phase of health-care reform. It fulfilled long-held conservative hopes when it moved Medicaid and Medicare onto the exchanges [created by the Affordable Care Act] and allowed seniors and low-income Americans to choose between the government behemoths and private insurance. But it also opened both programs to all Americans - making them akin to the public option that Democrats had been unable to pass in 2010. And as part of the deal, both were given more freedom to use a flood of comparative data in deciding what treatments to cover or refuse, which allowed them to finally stop paying for volume and begin paying for quality.

Full post as published by CL&P Blog on January 16, 2011 (boomark / email).