The State of Obamacare

Welcome to another edition of Curbside Consult. This week, we have a return appearance by Jonathan Cohn, senior editor at The New Republic. He’s one of the nation’s most widely read and respected reporters covering health policy and I’m happy to talk with him again about what’s happening with health reform.

Jonathan’s award-winning 2007 book Sick chronicled the plight of uninsured and underinsured Americans. The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande called Sick “stunningly important … In one damning true story after another, Jonathan Cohn lays bare the tragedy of our health care system.”

Our first Curbside Consult was last February. Almost a year later – and a couple of months after the launch of HealthCare.gov – we sat down again to talk about how things are going.

Part 1 of our interview is a broad-ranging conversation. We talk about what’s working with the law (and what’s not) – and also how the law could work better going forward. Jonathan digs into some of the specifics of exchange plans (and how those specifics may be confusing buyers). We also talked about enrollment numbers to date and what we can really take away from those numbers.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor at the School of Social Service Administration. He is also Co-Director of The University of Chicago Crime Lab. He has published widely at the interface between poverty policy and public health. Pollack serves as a Fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Ethics at the University of Chicago, and as an Adjunct Fellow at the Century Foundation.