Part of Obamacare is this concept called Accountable Care Ogranizations:
An ACO is a network of doctors and hospitals that shares responsibility for providing care to patients. In the new law, an ACO would agree to manage all of the health care needs of a minimum of 5,000 Medicare beneficiaries for at least three years.
The goal of these is to essentially get a dedicated group of healthcare providers in a given area to work together and deliver care to a group of people for a fixed cost, ultimately driving down the cost of care.
However, for the past few decades the federal government has been slowly and steadily making this kind of activity illegal due to anti-trust laws. The issue being that there were doctors and hospital groups in a local area getting so large that they were only referring to each other and therefore generating revenue only for themselves and artificially increasing costs.
But now the government has made an about face and is actually encouraging this kind of activity. The feds are even fighting internally to decide who gets to investigate the anti-trust concerns.
In other words, once a society becomes too complex, it’s impossible to simplify it. Our federal government produces 400 new pages of law every day. Are these laws adding value to our society, or reducing value? There comes a point at which the majority of our infrastructure will be in place to maintain complexity, not add real, get-things-done value.
For example, see Obstacles Seen in Poor Areas for New Farmers’ Markets:
For years, the Bloomberg administration has labored to improve the eating habits of New Yorkers, banning trans fats from restaurants, urging food purveyors to use less salt and creating special zoning to encourage fresh-food supermarkets to open in produce-poor neighborhoods.
But the city still puts roadblocks in the way of community groups seeking to open farmers’ markets in low-income neighborhoods, says a report to be released on Tuesday by the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. Those efforts face excessive fees, confusing rules and a lack of coordination among agencies, the report says.
“Instead of all the red tape, we should roll out the red carpet, because every time one of these farmers’ markets succeeds, you end up serving a community that has no access to this produce,” said Mr. Stringer, considered a likely mayoral candidate in 2013. “I think sometimes the job of the city government is to get out of the way and let things happen organically, no pun intended.”