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Obamacare is a large, unwieldy law. Despite its complexity, most people are familiar with its most important elements. They know it created a marketplace where people can shop for healthcare insurance; many are even aware that the cost of that insurance is subsidized for people with lower incomes. Others realize that Obamacare encouraged states to expand Medicaid. And of course, almost everyone has heard of the now defunct individual mandate which required people to purchase insurance or face a tax penalty.
But most Americans probably aren’t aware of what, in the long run, could turn out to be the most impactful part of the Affordable Care Act. The crafters of the ACA recognized that the science of healthcare delivery hadn’t advanced far enough to identify the best ways to improve healthcare quality while lowering healthcare costs. So, lawmakers set a slew of experiments in motion, designed to test ways of accomplishing these goals.
Results of those experiments have been coming out of the lab lately, raising the question of what kind of creatures Obamacare has been creating—are they like Frankenstein’s monster, terrifying but misunderstood? Are they like Edward Scissorhands, loved by suburban moms until they realize how dangerous he is? Or are they like a less renowned creature—Fusilli Jerry, the pasta stick figure that Kramer made for Jerry Seinfeld on that eponymous 1990s sitcom?
I side with the latter, because I view the Obamacare experiments as a type of pasta-flinging exercise. People at CMMI, the federal agency in charge of running these experiments, have been cooking up a bunch of ideas, throwing them into a pot, pulling them out one at a time, and then flinging them against a metaphorical wall to see which ones stick—which ones are ready for public consumption. Some relatively recent studies serve as a good introduction to what Obamacare has been cooking up for the American healthcare system.
(To read the rest of this article, please visit Forbes.)