The Real Weak Link In ObamaCare? You And Your Stupid Brain

Via Byron York....America, you've let Obama down. Again. You're lucky he's still willing to lecture you about how awesome he is.

Maybe our brains just aren’t wired to use a site like HealthCare.gov, whether it works or not.

The exchanges are based on a laudable idea: that competition, transparency and consumer choice will lead to higher-quality, more affordable products. The decisions consumers make will thus have significant implications for their own personal and financial health, as well as the overall sustainability of the exchanges. But despite the good intentions behind the website, behavioral science research suggests that many consumers may be ill equipped to make good decisions in the insurance marketplaces.

Choosing health coverage is particularly challenging. Humans have difficulty making optimal choices under conditions of uncertainty, when weighing probabilities of long-term risks and benefits, and when analyzing complex products with multiple components of unclear relative values. We’re bad at assessing the likelihood of low-probability events, like winning the lottery or getting in a car accident. We overestimate our ability to repay loans and spend more with credit cards than we would with cash. We struggle with decisions about how to invest our retirement savings and are highly susceptible to the number and types of 401(k) plans we’re offered. In short, we have trouble with precisely the types of issues involved in choosing the right health coverage.

Obama trusted in you and respected you enough to give you choices and you just can't handle it.

What a bunch of stupid simpletons you are!

The only small, barely worth mentioning problem with this theory and quite frankly I'm a little embarrassed to even bring it up, is that there were MORE choices for people BEFORE ObamaCare and it's non-functioning web portal were gifted to us.

Funny how millions of people managed to organize their lives to select their own plans based on cost and coverage as well as pay for them until ObamaCare came along to make it better for them. Now they can't buy insurance and have two weeks or so to scramble to find ways to try and stay covered.

And yet the ungrateful bastards are complaining.

You can see where this is going. Or maybe you can't because your tiny brains can't process all the possible choices available so let me help you out....Single Payer.

Just shut up, pay what the government tells you to pay and let the big brains figure it out for you.

More serious added thought:

A lot of people getting insurance through the market place may be people who are getting insurance for the first time either due to medical conditions or economic circumstances. Those groups could well be ill equipped to deal with the choices, limited though they are, presented by the ACA market places. This is especially true for high subsidy recipients who are being insulated form the true economic reality of their plans. It's hard to make rational decisions when the information is so distorted and disconnected from your actual economic conditions (you might qualify for a "cheap" plan after subsidies but can't afford any of the high deductible costs of the policy you are force to buy).

This is part of the problem, though Obama would see it as a feature. The ACA is redistributing health insurance dollars from people who have them and are used to making informed decisions to people who aren't.

It's not that "people" are too stupid to make good choices (millions and millions of people have been doing it for decades), it's that many core Democrats who will be the recipients of the spreading around of this wealth are.

posted by DrewM. at 10:45 AM

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