When I renewed my health insurance this year I told the insurance manager, Michael Olguin, that Obamacare would put him out of business, that was the point of the law. He, being a progressive Democrat, disagreed, thinking I did not understand how much better healthcare would be under the Affordable Care Act.
Today, Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects behind Obamacare, is now claiming that “insurance companies as we know them are about to die.” There you have it, the truth of the matter on Obamacare.
Emanuel, the brother of Obama’s former chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel felt comfortable enough to reveal some of the true intentions of the healthcare law.
“The good news is you won’t have insurance companies to kick around much longer. The system is changing,” Emanuel writes in an op-ed on New Republic. “As a result, insurance companies as they are now will be going away. Indeed, they are already evolving. For the next few years insurance companies will both continue to provide services to employers and, increasingly, compete against each other in the health insurance exchanges.”
The ACOs will have “standardized, guideline-driven care plans for most major conditions and procedures to increase efficiency,” says Emanuel, the brother of Obama’s former chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“They will have figured out how to harness their electronic medical records to better identify patients who will become sick and how to intervene early as well as how to care for the well-identified chronically ill so as to reduce costs,” he notes.
According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an ACO is “an organization of health care providers that agrees to be accountable for the quality, cost, and overall care of Medicare beneficiaries who are enrolled in the traditional fee-for-service program who are assigned to it.”
In other words, the ACO will be beholden to the single payer of the US government. Having these terms better defined explains why Emanuel is so very happy to pronounce that “As the ACOs become more established, contracts between the health systems and employers will become more common, thus cutting out the insurance companies.”
Once the health systems “make the jump to offering coverage in the exchanges, the health insurance companies will only have a few options if they want to survive, according to Emanuel.
“First, they can refuse to change, in which case they will eventually go out of business,” he writes. “Second, they can shift their business to focus on offering services they have expertise in, particularly analytics, actuarial modeling, risk management, and other management services.”
Finally, the “third evolutionary path is that health insurance companies may transform themselves into integrated delivery systems.”
“So be prepared to kiss your insurance company good-bye forever,” Emanuel concludes.
This is the point of Obamacare, to eliminate the private sector from healthcare and migrate to a single payer system as the vestiges of the old order die off.
