Watching the slow death of About to Collapse Anyday (ACA) is like watching Hillary climb stairs. It's conclusion is inevitable but the process is painful. The deterioration is akin to rapidly advancing cancer where the patient gets emaciated and weaker, yet the doctors continue to pursue old-fashioned remedies. Remember leeches (no, not the ones in D.C.) but the truly blood-sucking riverine parasites? It is thought that over-treatment with leeches was a major contributor to George Washington's death. So what is the current plan to resuscitate this mortally wounded patient. Well, the associates of Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel (famous for being the one to discover Rahm was his brother instead of an alien) responsible for inflicting this medically unsustainable polymorphic oozing wound on the already failing U.S. Healthcare "system" have come with one prong to the solution for failing ACA policies, which is to disincentivize physicians even further by introducing legislation (still in the embryo, pre-cancerous) phase which will add more paperwork and potentially reduce physician reimbursement. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is studying this treatment plan to see how quickly or slowly it should be inflicted upon the health care providers (including physical therapists, nurse practitioners, psychologists, etc).

Hint to the co-conspirators: penalizing healthcare providers in order to save a dying patient is not exactly the most rational way to go about revitalizing the ACA. (Personal note: the reason I quit practicing was because of the increasing administrative burdens which took time away from what I wanted to do: aid people with health problems).

What is this cancer debilitating and slowly killing ACA? Most of us already know: Insurance Companies. As many are also aware, Aetna has attempted to blackmail Uncle Sham by pulling out of the "exchanges" wherein the client (aka insured) exchanges his/her money for progressively less coverage). This is a peculiar situation because these "Insurance" companies are already getting getting financial incentives (which might be considered kickbacks if anyone other than the government did this). Why, you ask, would Uncle do this? Because the ICs (Insurance companies) were whining about receiving less than their expected profits. One of ACA's supposed benefits was to limit IC profits to 20% of premium paid, the rest allegedly going to patient care (but in reality a lot of that money was siphoned out of the system by Big Pharma--which is a story for another day). So to improve profitability the gov't. has subsidized the ICs to the point where they could achieve their expected profits. This practice violates Federal Law (sorry, can't find the citation now) but OBummer decided to do this anyway to preserve his "baby", aka crowning legacy.

But the ICs then became somewhat different than Insurance Companies, they have become Institutionalized Cancers. Anyone with rudimentary knowledge that cancer is not symbiotic--it does not allow the victim to continue living so eventually by killing the patient also kills itself (sounds like Clinton's foreign policy--but I digress). Greed is a cancer: greed begets greed. Money, money, money!

The cost has now become too much to bear for the would-be insured. No less than a Democratic governor has even said so. Affordability has now been expunged from ACA--so that now it's true nature is revealed: CA, medical short-hand for cancer.

Medical statistics have verified this Cancer eating at the corpus. So the great bonus trumpeted about by OBummer and Dr. Zeke of having more "insured" people in the population is slowly unravelling. Remember the plan that supposed to give you
healthcare and keep your own doctor? This is becoming a vision fading rapidly from sight.

So this is what the current state of the patient's condition is:
1. less doctors participating
2. not your own physician if he/she is not in your IC's network
3. less coverage than before
4. more personal expense
5. maintenance of IC income by illegal Federal subsidies to individual companies

Treatment Plan:
1. disincentivize healthcare providers (beatings will stop after morale improves)
2. continued travel down the road to failure devised by the same architects who messed up the system already
3. continuing kickbacks to ICs
4. failure to rein in Big Pharma
5. optimistic happy talk about the continuing collapse as a mere "glitch"--after all we don't want to demoralize the patient

Prognosis: Terminal

And now an anecdote which will further disillusion you Hillbots (if there are any here). Do you remember a woman named Hillary who told this old white guy from Vermont (and a few million other people) that the ACA needed to be improved incrementally (you know, like cutting off a gangrenous appendage an inch at a time) and that there was no way a public option could ever work? Do you remember her? I'm not sure she members Her (either due to inability to remember one lie from another OR advancing dementia OR both). Well this Hillary person has a campaign chairman named John Preposterous Podesta. It seems that John has been talking in his sleep and some crafty Russkies tape recorded his somnolent mumblings. In fact, one the culprits has taken the liberty to release the true feelings of Killary's closest political adviser on the subject of never-never medicare-for-all single payer:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTS-9rx3RgE]

The interesting part--for the purposes of this essay comes at 20:00. To spare those who can't take the time to this otherwise excellent 35 minute video: John Podesta says "Thank God for single payer (Medicare)" after he just turned 65.