June 2016 | Joel C. Cantor | Opinion: Taking Stock of New Jersey Health Insurance Coverage Under Obamacare
As a health policy professor, I’m often asked by skeptics, supporters, and just regular folks what I think about Obamacare. Is it a good thing? Is it working? My first response, like any true academic, is, “It’s complicated.”
Even to a casual observer, however, the Affordable Care Act is indeed complicated. That complexity reflects that lawmakers sought to maintain as much of the healthcare status quo as they could in crafting the reform law. (Remember President Barack Obama’s now notorious statement that “If you like your health plan, you can keep it”?) That vision (whether you think it was achieved or not) means that the ACA would inevitably be fraught with complexity. Patching a complex system can be nothing other than complex.