A lot of friends have asked me what I think of the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the constitutionality of the Obama Healthcare Law.

I tell them it makes no difference.

Some of them retort and mention the newly insured people. I agree the PPACA will help them by providing health insurance, though there’s a lot of uncertainty of how exactly this will play out: how many employers will pay for insurance vs. pay the penalty.

My point is that the PPACA does nothing substantial to lower the growth of healthcare costs. The biggest single change in the law is that it will put more working poor on Medicaid, which means the feds will just buy more of the dysfunctional healthcare system we already have.

A colleague of mine from the Oregon Health Sciences University, Jennifer DeVoe, MD, DPhil, and I wrote a paper showing how even under optimistic assumptions, the PPACA pushes back the point where a family health insurance premium equals average household income by just four years. Here is the link to the article.

http://www.annfammed.org/content/10/2/156.full.pdf+html

We will never get to the root cause of exorbitant U.S. healthcare costs until we change the U.S. doctor-patient relationship — that all possible services be provided no matter how rare the benefit or expensive the service.

Those of us who want to protect our children from a mountain of unsustainable debt have a lot of unfinished business the PPACA does not fix.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2012 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.