A Nice Little Gift from ObamaCare Directly to You
http://wendellpotter.com/2012/07/a-nice-little-gift-from-obamacare-directly-to-you/Ive often said the U.S. health care system is so complex that trying to understand it makes your hair hurt. Case in point: the Affordable Care Act runs more than 2,000 pages. Ill grant you that its a massive piece of legislation but lawmakers felt thats what was needed to fix at least some of the problems that resulted from the helter-skelter way our health care system developed.
This complexity also helps explain why it has been so difficult for the Obama administration to communicate how the numerous provisions of the law will likely benefit average Americans. And it also explains why so many journalists covering health care often do little more than he said, she said reporting. Going deeper requires a willingness to figure out how to make arcane but important parts of the system interesting and relevant.
Ill never forget being told by a reporter for a major financial publication while I was still at Cigna that her editor would not let her use the term reinsurance in a story she was writing about my firm even though the company had just disclosed having to take a big charge against earnings because of problems within the companys reinsurance operations. She said her editor believed readers simply couldnt wrap their heads around the concept of reinsurance.
Similarly, many reporters refused or were not allowed to use the term medical loss ratio during the reform debate, even though changes in that mathematical equation can mean the difference between black ink and red ink on an insurance companys balance sheet. Thats why shareholders and Wall Street financial analysts keep close tabs on it and why its something we all ought to know a bit about.