What is the biggest waste of effort in American health care today?
I’d suggest it is the hustle and bustle to establish PPACA’s Health Benefits Exchanges. The health insurers’ trade association, AHIP, has an entire educational series on “preparing for exchanges.” The likelihood of exchanges being up and running by January 2014 is vanishingly close to zero. Indeed, they may not exist at all except in very few states – whether or not President Obama wins re-election.
Last January, I wrote in The Health Care Blog that states should not collaborate with the federal government in establishing exchanges. Almost all states have taken this course. Recent days have brought forward new evidence that exchanges are facing even bigger problems than previously understood. The New York Times reports that Republican state senators are blocking a bill that would allow the state to establish an exchange and claim federal handouts to get it up and running. (A few weeks previously, Kansas governor Brownback actually sent a $31.5 million federal PPACA grant back to D.C.).
If they can’t get a PPACA exchange up and running in New York, of all places, where the heck will they? Only 13 states have passed pro-exchange legislation (and some of these bills don’t do much more than establish study groups).
