re: Obamacare -what's right and what's wrong with it

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Society decided it was a moral issue that citizens were being denied medical care due to increasingly cutthroat decisions being made by health insurance actuaries to maintain minimal profit margins. As society had progressed from the 1930s, we had not rethought our system of allocating health care resources.

The main problems were:

1. Health insurers provide a necessary service for their customers by negotiating with doctors and streamlining the issues of costs.

2. But health insurance the way it has operated over the last 30 years in particular is always a losing proposition. Too much advancement in end of life care and advancement in treating cancer, etc raises costs and the stubborn, hardy customers who can subsidize the above easily chose to avoid paying anything at all.

3. So insurance companies began to ditch cost-heavy customers. This should have been the only issue discussed for such a massive bill, with a chief goal of providing the same service of health insurers (streamline cost and paperwork) to these customers only and with maximum efficiency and minimal disruption to the existing market or to the broader tax base.

I've seen tons of ideas floated and agree with many of them in some fashion or another.

After a decade plus of research and debate, I lean towards a multi-prong approach of

1. HICs should not be forced to cover customers with pre-existing conditions.

2. Regulations governing the purchase of insurance over state lines are purged, all regulations designed to facilitate the purchase of insurance by customers individually or by group from any insurer they choose.

3. Customers who cannot purchase insurance due to pre-existing conditions are allowed to buy in to Medicaid at a rate that is subsidized by a federal VAT on cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, (now decriminalized) marijuana, and motorcycles.

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Those are not problems let alone the main problem.

You haven't even identified the problem, health insurance is not the problem. Health care costs are the problem.