A few years back I was talking to a Forensic Analytics company Beyondcore about why the Affordable Health Care Act wasn’t affordable. Forensic Analytics is a very specialized field which looks and the core reasons for why something is. We tend to spend a lot of time on the what, in this case Obama Care sucks, but not nearly enough of the why which speaks to the difficulty in fixing it. I mean if you don’t understand why something is broken you’ll likely fail at fixing it which is clearly a big part of the mess in getting the replacement for Obama Care through congress, it actually looks worse and no one really wants worse.
Let’s talk about the core problem with the national healthcare effort then and now and why an information/analytics approach to the problem could come up with a better solution. However, this also points to the common problem with analytics, often people leave off a critical factor and end up making a bad decision. Which I think speaks to the train wreck we are now seeing.
Obamacare Mistake
The core problem that Beyondcore was trying to address was the fact that when proposed the Obamacare numbers looked pretty good and the core numbers had been deeply analyzed by a variety of organizations and analysts. But, once in place, the red ink poured out of the program causing some smart politicians and bureaucrats to ask why. As it turns out there was a fundamental mistake made in the analysis. A core belief in the program was that young users, who would be required to buy into the program, would generate enough extra cash to pay for the lower health and higher healthcare usage of older users. This was based on the accurate belief that young users don’t go to doctors as often, but what was left out of this analysis was psychiatric care which was covered by the program. Apparently, Millennials need an unusual amount of psychiatric care which wasn’t factored in when the program was created and thus generate little or no extra cash so the medical needs of the older users weren’t in fact covered. This Obamacare, because psychiatric care was left out of the analysis but covered by the insurance, tanked the financials of the program.
Hidden Tax
Now another problem with this concept was that the program was intended to cover pre-existing medical problems from those that didn’t have insurance. This isn’t insurance it is basically a gift from the State to those that either chose not to carry insurance or couldn’t afford it. This cost had to be spread to those that had paid for insurance as an effective tax concealed as an insurance rate increase and/or a reduction in benefits. Many of us got both, our rates went up along with our co-pays and costs associated with medication and special procedures.
