Obamacare: Cost-Benefit Analysis

A further problem associated with the costs of Obamacare is the enormous overhead which the production, maintenance, and general administration of the program requires. As Dan Mangan points out, the overhead costs associated with the development and implementation run upwards of $270 billion. In developing this point, Mangan writes, “The overhead cost [of Obamacare] equals a whopping 22.5 percent of the estimated $2.76 trillion in all federal government spending for the Affordable Care Act programs during that time . . . In contrast, the federal government’s traditional Medicare program has an overhead of just 2 percent” (Mangan, 2015). To a considerable extent, the massively large overhead that has historically come to be associated with Obamacare comes from the

While I am completely on board with the goals of Obamacare, as I believe the achievement of a truly universal form of healthcare would be a major achievement of any government, culture, or civilization should be proud, I think the arguments advanced by Mangan and McCardle are sufficient to demonstrate that the processes of implementation currently employed by the administration of Obamacare are inefficient and ultimately unsustainable over the long run. Fundamentally, Obamacare seems to me to be trying to ‘have its cake and eat it