Free Republic

Our recent interview with Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel about his provocative prediction that most employers will abandon health coverage by 2025 struck a nerve with You’re The Boss readers. It came as no surprise that Dr. Emanuel’s claim, first made in his new book, “Reinventing American Health Care,” would be swept up in the broader political and ideological debate about the Affordable Care Act. But in their many comments, readers raised interesting questions, and we took some of them back to Dr. Emanuel in another conversation that appears, edited and condensed, below. It’s worth noting that among those readers who...

The administration’s rollout plans for their perfect ObamaCare timeline just keep getting punctuated with flaws and delays, from Sebelius oh-so-casually admitting that the overhaul is causing some insurance premiums to rise, to Congressional Democrats’ buyers’ remorse for the godawful medical device tax, to their recent decision to hold off on the promised small-business insurance-shopping option for a year. Whichever way you look at it, the telltale signs of bureaucratic incompetence are starting to peek through — and really, as Krauthammer outlined last night, how could it have gone otherwise? In a nutshell, ObamaCare basically dissolves the basic idea of insurance...

Democrats understand that when they are losing a political fight, their best move is to change the political lexicon. When progressivism fails, they become liberals; when liberalism fails, they become progressives. Now they’re using that rhetorical trickery to try to save the wildly unpopular centerpiece of President Obama’s first term: Obamacare. Obamacare sets up what were originally termed state health care “exchanges.” These “exchanges” were supposedly set up to pool risk between health care insurance companies. Of course, if the market saw a benefit in such pooling, it would have done so already. In fact, many insurance companies already pool...