Re: The PPACA Thread Part III - Let's have a healthy debate!
The age to be forced to become on Medicare (in order to receive Social Security) is 65. For your stats, that's birth years 1947-1950. Gee, which generation had a lot of people born then... Not to mention, how many companies have been shoved out due to the complexities of the PPACA... Nice try.
Quite the tangent (which I'm not even following).
But now that you bring it up...just how have companies been affected 'by the complexities' of the ACA? That notably communist rag, Fortune magazine, has a fairly comprehensive perspective:
"How well is the Affordable Care Act working?
The natural inclination is to look backwards—to judge whether the ACA has measurably improved the health care system in the last 6 years. Here, the answer is clearly yes. Nearly 19 million people have gotten insured. And health care inflation has been lower than at any time in the last 50 years, although drug costs are going up faster. Not bad.
A better way to evaluate the ACA is to look forward—to assess whether the law is setting the framework for a higher quality and lower-cost system. The best window on the future is the health care start-up sector.
Overall, 2015 was a record year for medical investing, including in biotech companies making new drugs. But it was also a record year for investing in start-ups aimed at improving quality or reducing costs. In 2011, just after passage of the ACA, about $1.1 billion was invested in “technology-centric, health-related companies that facilitate healthcare administration, delivery, or access.” In 2014 and 2015, that figured skyrocketed to over $4.3 billion.
Where is all this money going?
A lot of it is going where you might expect: new apps and technological innovations to deliver care more efficiently. But, perhaps surprisingly, many of these start-ups are working to redesign and reimagine parts of the health care system that already exist but aren’t working well or have been long ignored. Similarly, several companies have dedicated themselves to modernizing primary care practices by using big data. There are a string of new companies working to improve another problem area: mental and behavioral health. Still, others are rethinking traditional care using the Uber model. The ACA is also unleashing a flood of talented entrepreneurs into health care. Entrepreneurs who used to go to traditional Silicon Valley start-ups focused on search, shopping, sharing, and software are now migrating to health care."
http://fortune.com/2016/03/15/obamacare-affordable-care-act/
And best of all and unlike simple manufacturing, these are segments where the US must win or it fails. All in all, I'd say the complexities of the ACA have worked out just fine for the US.
