John Mauldin's Outside the Box - Jonathan Tepper on Obamacare

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Nov 06, 2013
John Mauldin

November 5, 2013

The Affordable Care Act is the single most contentious political action of my lifetime since the Vietnam War. It touches everyone in one way or another, and often in profoundly personal ways. Some see it is a godsend and others as an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the American experiment. Some will experience healthcare that is now available for themselves and their families for the first time, while others will experience the loss of a system that had served them well. The story in the Wall Street Journal this week of the cancer survivor Edie Littlefield Sundby, who lost her doctors and affordable care in the middle of a true life-and-death battle, is poignant. It turns out that not only can she not buy insurance that will cross state lines, she cannot buy insurance in California that will cross county lines!

As I highlighted a few weeks ago, the US system is dysfunctional, yet the potential for positive change is rather spectacularly illustrated by work done by Dr. Jeff Brenner in Camden, New Jersey. Basically, he found that 1% of the patients in Camden were responsible for 30% of hospitalization costs. Sometimes called super utilizers, high utilizers, or frequent fliers, these patients have complex medical conditions and often lack social services such as transportation or knowledge about how to use the health system most effectively. By some estimates, 5% of these patients account for more than 60% of all healthcare costs. This is a system that is so dysfunctional that it does not even work for those who are getting the care! There are scores of such opportunities throughout the healthcare system to reduce costs and improve services, so I write not of a bleak healthcare future, just a profoundly changing one.

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