Our good friend Bob Graboyes (senior research fellow for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University) has some key insights into the failed ObamaTax roll-out. Among them:
"Other than “more people with insurance,” the law’s goals were never clearly stated, so there are few objective metrics on which to judge it. More are insured, but there’s no increase in supply of health care to meet any new demand."
As our own Bob Vineyard pointed out some years ago, this is an utterly predictable result of inelasticity:
"The economics of goods and services can be reduced to simple demand and supply. Health care is no different. It follows economic theory just like every other consumer good.At either extreme you have inelastic price curves and elastic curves. Most consumer items track a bell curve but some things are totally elastic or totally inelastic."
That is, more people may have insurance (although this remains unproven), but the supply of actual health care remains steady (or is, in fact, falling). So how valuable is your ObamaPlan if you can't find a provider who accepts it?
Then there's the little problem of administering your plan if you're fortunate enough to be able to afford and are successful in actually buying one:
"[T]he back end is still dysfunctional. It’s very difficult for a consumer to conduct a transaction as you would with, say, Amazon.com, that results in verifiable coverage. Pen, paper, and processing time are still required"
And how does one track changes made this way?
There's lots more, all of it good, all of it important.
Read the whole thing.
"Other than “more people with insurance,” the law’s goals were never clearly stated, so there are few objective metrics on which to judge it. More are insured, but there’s no increase in supply of health care to meet any new demand."
As our own Bob Vineyard pointed out some years ago, this is an utterly predictable result of inelasticity:
"The economics of goods and services can be reduced to simple demand and supply. Health care is no different. It follows economic theory just like every other consumer good.At either extreme you have inelastic price curves and elastic curves. Most consumer items track a bell curve but some things are totally elastic or totally inelastic."
That is, more people may have insurance (although this remains unproven), but the supply of actual health care remains steady (or is, in fact, falling). So how valuable is your ObamaPlan if you can't find a provider who accepts it?
Then there's the little problem of administering your plan if you're fortunate enough to be able to afford and are successful in actually buying one:
"[T]he back end is still dysfunctional. It’s very difficult for a consumer to conduct a transaction as you would with, say, Amazon.com, that results in verifiable coverage. Pen, paper, and processing time are still required"
And how does one track changes made this way?
There's lots more, all of it good, all of it important.
Read the whole thing.
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