The thesis is more of the same from President Obama and his Administration – a public option and continued federal interference in health care markets will strengthen and improve the legacy of the Affordable Care Act.
The President’s recent submission to the Journal of the American Medical Association is a personal policy defense of his hallmark health care initiative before the medical community. The President even took the opportunity to go beyond ACA and attacked pharmaceutical manufacturers to relinquish hard-earned intellectual property in the name of pricing transparency, a flawed policy approach that will fail to lower prescription drug prices and only stifle medical innovation and future discovery.
Unfortunately, many of the President’s arguments in the special JAMA article fail to recognize the negative impacts of the law on the already-insured and the employer community which robustly provides health insurance for nearly half of the nation’s population.
