Why Is Obamacare Complicated

This is the title of a blog by Paul Krugman recently and his answer seems dead on to me. It is because of the insurance companies.

Obamacare, or more properly, the Affordable Health Care, is a Frankinsteinian monster of a bunch of stuff put together because the insurance company lobbies were and are so powerful, wanting things a particular way.

Contrast the Affordable Health Care plan to Social Security or Medicare, neither of which is very complicated. If we had a health plan like those two it would be a single payer program, like the other major countries have.

Now a single player program was doomed because of insurance company powers. A sensible person might conclude that if we had a single payer program run by the government, all those folk who worked in the insurance industry in health care would then have become government workers, minus of course, the bloated salaries of their CEO’s.

Then comes the software boondoggle, which, though unrelated to the concept, gives talking points to the opponents of the Affordable Health Care Plan.