Austin Frakt continues with his righteous outrage over the ACA data problem, which we’ve also seen in the Medicare Advantage program. A cynic would suggest that this and other problems derives from the fact that ACA was tailored to meet the needs of private insurers.
One familiar rejoinder is that congressional conservatives should have solved the problem by promising to vote for a budget-busting new entitlement in order to make it marginally less egregious. A parallel argument: if more Senate Democrats promised to back deep tax cuts in 2001, they could have improved on what ended up being a sunset-ridden, code-complexifying mess. That might be true. Of course, congressional liberals saw deep tax cuts as a bad idea that threatened to undermine the taxpayer-financed public services that they like, and with good reason.