Angelina’s story is America’s story. Here, insurance companies, hospitals, and providers battle for dominance. Once the dust settles, the patient is buried under the mayhem, wondering why they can’t afford a ten-minute ambulance ride. Politicians and citizens know the system broken, but the question remains: how to fix the rambling drunk of US healthcare?
“If you could design a system to bring out the latent schizophrenia in the American population, this would be it,” says Laura Brown, a fellow at the Organization for Reasonable Solutions to Unreasonable Problems. “Do you hear voices telling you to take a machete and threaten an insurance company representative? Not yet... but you will.”
Instead of solutions, however, the debate has revived the same political drama: Democrats want too much change whereas Republicans never want change. “The United States has the best healthcare in the world,” says Senator Jarvis (R-Ark). “We have a plan, and it’s called leave everything the way it is.”
In 2010, however, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare” or “Still-Hasn’t-Shown-Us-His-Birth-Certificate Care.” After a rollout like a train immediately derailing and exploding, the ACA was then stripped, beaten, and mocked by everyone from the Supreme Court to your uncle who listens to conservative talk radio.
The law made headway in reeling back insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, raising premiums, and eating the souls of deceased policy holders. Yet, it fell short of the single-payer, government-based system the left believes would save America. They point to European healthcare as proof the Americans can get perfectly mediocre service for much less than Americans spend.