The PowerPoint presentation below contains the slides I used today to accompany a presentation on the above subject to the Lubbock Roundtable. It is just an outline to my remarks.

The quotation below belongs to slide #36. Its from The Obamacare Crisis by Thomas B Edsall in the  New York Times November 19, 2013. The decision to stop routine screening mammography in Switzerland (slide 17) was discussed by me in an earlier post.

This system requires coordination of over 288 policy options (an average of eight insurers are competing for business in 36 states), each with three or more levels of coverage, while simultaneously calculating beneficiary income, tax credit eligibility, subsidy levels, deductibles, not to mention protecting applicant privacy, insuring web security and managing a host of other data points.

A malfunction at any one of these junctures could prove fatal.

In enacting the Affordable Care Act, President Obama and his Democratic supporters in Congress took on the task of creating a set of information technologies that has to interconnect with the I.R.S.; the Departments of Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security; the Social Security administration; state governments; insurers; employers; hospitals; and practitioners in the private sector.

WHY IS MEDICAL CARE SO EXPENSIVE?, June 2014