Our health system is a mess. The latest major effort to “fix” it was Obamacare (the so-called “Affordable Health Act”)–two thousand pages cobbled together by lobbyists, deep state staffers, and legislative log-rolling that resulted in high costs, opaque rules, perverse incentives, and unintended consequences.
(p. A15) Medicare doles out reimbursements for services that may or may not be real, helpful to the recipient, or reasonably priced. It’s very hard to know. Congress doesn’t want doctors and hospitals back home closely policed. Result: Medicare controls spending, perversely, with blanket low reimbursement rates for necessary and unnecessary services alike.
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. . . government programs are born in chaos—with congressional horse trading and payoffs to appease interest groups. That’s why government programs make so little organizational sense. Remember when we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it? (“Two thousand pages of nonsense,” said Warren Buffett at the time. “The problem is incentives.”)
For the full commentary see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 11, 2025, and has the title “Business World; DOGE Is Elon Musk’s Useful Experiment.” In both the online and print versions, the phrase “born in chaos” appears in italics for emphasis.)