The Case for Single-Price Health Care
Obamacare has taken a licking but keeps on ticking. The prospect of repeal died on the Senate floor. Republican efforts to roll it back continue, but the bulk of the program is still in place and unlikely to go anywhere. Virginia appears, as of this writing, on the way to expanding Medicaid, and other states will likely follow. Thanks mostly to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, some eighteen million more people have health insurance today than when Obamacare went into effect, cutting the uninsured population nearly in half.
But while progress has been made on expanding access, another problem keeps getting worse: the soaring cost of health care for those who get their insurance through their employers. For these folks—who make up the majority of middle-class, working-age Americans—the ever-rising costs of premiums, deductibles, and co-pays has turned into a full-blown crisis.