ABSTRACT

Any new plans to reform the health system, when announced by individual politicians, attract the attention of the public, the media, and so on. Thus, they can often seem new and different from earlier solutions. One of the purposes of this book is to demonstrate that the changes introduced by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as ObamaCare or PPACA) were generally nothing new in the long history of government intervention in the US health system, both regarding the newly introduced regulations and their effects. As it will be shown, ObamaCare is another series of interventions to tackle problems arising from previous interventions. The new regulations are, therefore, the result of the dynamic nature of interventionism, which means that the willingness to solve specific economic problems by means of successive interventions only worsens the problem by further disrupting market processes.