From 2000 to the start of the pandemic we made strong progress on health and other goals. The pandemic is a huge setback.
One of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) makes the case for why the U.S. health care system needed reform and how Obamacare sets out to fix the problems. Although he was deeply involved in its creation, Ezekiel J. Emanuel is good about making it clear when he’s educating you about the history of health care and when he’s advocating for his ideas. In Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act Will Improve Our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System, he calls out a few things he disagreed with in Obamacare, like the creation of a separate health-insurance exchange for small businesses. And unlike a lot of experts, he’s willing to make predictions about how health care will change in the coming years. Some day we’ll be able to look back and see whether he was right. The facts and history that Emanuel lays out would be useful to anyone involved in the debate over health care, no matter what their point of view is.