Reply #17: And in 10 years we'll probably have 3 or 4 big insurance companies left

[Recursion]

With a few bit players doing niche business in the exchanges. Those three will negotiate quality of service and price deals with HHS, just like Bell did with the FCC, and in combination with the expanded FQHC system we will more or less have a situation where everybody has access to medical care, even if it's more expensive than it otherwise could be. Small businesses and low-wage businesses will stop providing health insurance altogether, and the fines they pay for that will fund the subsidies for their employees on the exchange. It's perverse, twisted, and silly if you were to look at it without an historical context, but then again so was the existence of Bell, and all in all that turned out pretty well. (Like Obama said, if we were starting from scratch we would build a national health system or at least a single-payer reimbursement system, but we aren't starting from scratch, we're starting from where we are and there's not a path from point A to point B that doesn't risk causing bigger problems than it solves.)