Thank you, for your thoughfully reasoned comment. Yes, you are absolutely correct, this bill was crafted to send tentacles into every conceivable corner of our economy and society. It affects both fiscal and personal/social issues intimately. Any change or repeal will cause disruption (i.e. pain) in at least one, most likely many, parts of the system, and some contingent will then capitalize on it with manufactured stories from the eneMedia.
It will NOT be easy, like a lot of commenting FReepers think it will. A massive ship cannot be turned on a dime.
There are so many parts to this...and an inevitable part of it, because of how evil and statist it is, is that it makes the cost of implementing and meeting all of the requirements to conform to it so high, that the concept of a small community hospital is becoming extinct.
Across the health care landscape, small hospitals are facing the choice of either going belly up, or being absorbed into a larger hospital network. If they exist in such a state they won’t add anything to a larger organization, or are positioned to deal with the same patient population already being administered by some other smaller or larger hospital, then...they don’t have a choice.
In those cases, they go belly-up, the employees all lose their jobs, and the patients who loved getting their care in a smaller, more personal setting, now have to go to larger, more impersonal settings.
I had dinner last night with a group of people, and one of them was a lib who was crushed by Clinton’s defeat. She worked at a smaller hospital for decades and didn’t lose her job when her smaller community hospital got absorbed into a larger network, but she bemoaned the fact that she now worked for a larger organization that was only concerned with profits, and treated her as a faceless number, so she left that organization and found a job at another hospital.
She seemed nice enough, but lacked the intellectual capability to link her choice of candidate and ideology to the situation she found herself in.
It was all I could do to sit there and be polite. Didn’t want to be that turd in the punchbowl for all the others there.