Recent healthcare reform efforts have almost exclusively focused on individual exchanges, but politicians would are better off focusing their energy on more fundamental structural flaws in the U.S. healthcare system, according to an op-ed penned by Hunt Lawrence and Daniel Flynn in the The American Spectator.
Though the authors acknowledge that millions of Americans obtain insurance through state exchanges, they say far more people are covered either through government programs or employer-sponsored plans, and they believe focusing on individual exchanges while ignoring bigger flaws in the system is not seeing the forest for the trees.
"We fixate on the few without coverage rather than the many facing out-of-control costs. We worry whether the president continues to pay a $7 billion subsidy to keep individual markets afloat but seem aloof to the $3 trillion-plus annual healthcare bill that sinks our economy," the authors write.
Mr. Flynn and Mr. Lawrence believe ACA regulations put an undue burden on insurance companies and force them to pay for treatments they are not responsible for, such as those that come as a result of obesity or smoking. The systemic flaws they refer to seem to be limited to the ACA itself, and though they offer no alternative, they believe stripping away ACA regulations is the solution to the nation's healthcare woes.
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