The MSM halfway catches up with me on #Obamacare

It's long been clear to me that Obamacare is at least semi-broken. (Well, that's setting aside another issue that I've repeatedly blogged about — we don't even have "Obamacare" since Dear Leader himself, its namesake, has delayed implementation of several of its major portions — some delayed repeatedly.)

Well, the Old Gray Lady has finally weighed in, at least in part.  

The nut grafs are buried near the end, in two quotes, especially the second:

Dr. John W. Rowe, who was the chief executive of Aetna from 2000 to 2006 and the president of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York before that, predicted that “the insurance market will stabilize in two or three years.”

“We are not in a death spiral,” Dr. Rowe said. “If this were a patient, I would say that he’s not in intensive care, but he’s still in the hospital and requires careful monitoring.”

But that does not mean the act will heal on its own, said Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University.

“Even the most ardent proponents of the law would say that it has structural and technical problems that need to be addressed,” she said. “The subsidies were not generous enough. The penalties for not getting insurance were not stiff enough. And we don’t have enough young healthy people in the exchanges.”

Bingo.

The big issue is that these were issues largely known in 2008. Hillary Clinton called Obama out for not having any sort of penalty in his plan. That, in turn leads to not enough young people enrolled. These could have been fixed as part of the original law — which also could have been less complicated, especially in its not-yet-implemented areas.

The lack of subsidies? That's on Obamacare vs. single-payer.

(In turn, that ignores that the profit motive, and a hypercapitalist version, may be so ingrained in the American medical system that we need a British-type NHS.)

As for the public option, the devil is in the details.

Contra Bernie Sanders, I think it should have deductions and co-pays similar to single-payer systems in other developed countries. 

At the same time, it should be more generous in psychiatric coverage than current private insurance.

Meanwhile, in your hypocrisy alert of the day, the Slickster is calling O-care "the craziest thing in the world." And Madame Slickster has also, despite wrapping herself in the flag of O-care vs. Bernie Sanders, has made recent similar cracks. Indeed, the flag-wrapping included her claim that O-care was originally H-care.

And, an update, as the Big Dog tries to walk it back, including:

(T)he insurance model "doesn't make sense" and "doesn't work here."

So, he now backs single-payer?

As for differences between O-care and Hillarycare, the small businesses the Slickster claims to defend opposed Hillarycare because it would have forced them to provide coverage. Politico has a thumbnail sketch of the few differences between the two.