HOW ESSENTIAL IS GUARANTEED COVERAGE AND WHO IS BEST PREPARED TO PROVIDE IT?

The Republicans’ seven year plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act was voted down a few months ago by a late-night “thumbs down” from Senator John McCain. The Washington Post called that late night “the most dramatic night in the United States Senate in recent history,” and so it’s somehow fitting that the Graham-Cassidy Bill, a final “Hail Mary” to enact healthcare reform before the Senate deadline of September 30th, is being debated primarily on late-night television.

Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, became the unlikely voice of the movement to protect healthcare when his son was born with a heart defect that required emergency – and expensive – surgery. His plea, that no family be denied healthcare because they couldn’t afford it, became informally known as the Kimmel Test. Senator Bill Cassidy ( R-LA ), one of the authors of the new bill, went on Kimmel’s show to promise that the GOP healthcare reform would pass the Kimmel Test, and now the Senator and the talk show host are at odds in the media over the bill’s intentions.

SWARM INTELLIGENCE EVOLVED TO SOLVE COMPLEX PROBLEMS

Healthcare is incredibly complicated, as the President can attest, so researchers at Unanimous A.I. turned to our Swarm A.I. platform for insight into the debate around protections for pre-existing conditions and lifetime coverage caps. Under the ACA, no one can be denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions, whereas the Graham-Cassidy Bill, requires only that healthcare be “adequate and affordable” without defining either term. To find out how voters would interpret these protections, our researchers asked a group of 30 Americans to combine their wisdom and intuition using our Swarm A.I. technology. 20 of those voters were registered Independents, with the others split between Republicans and Democrats.

As you can see, the swarm of voters was emphatic regarding the importance of coverage for pre-existing conditions. After all, those who are sick already are most likely to need ongoing coverage, and most at-risk if they require care that is not covered by insurance. Lifetime coverage caps are a natural extension of pre-existing conditions, as though requiring long-term care are will naturally cost insurance companies more money. Here again, the swarm deemed the elimination of coverage caps, “essential.”

At the core of Cassidy’s argument is the belief that states are much better equipped to deal with their individual concerns than would be the federal government. This is a quintessential big government vs small question, and so our researchers wanted to know, is Cassidy’s argument convincing? After all, it’s easy to see that the needs of a state like California are very different from a state like Wyoming or Rhode Island. So, why not let the states handle individually? Or, as some free-market capitalists would argue, why not let the companies themselves decide? This sort of multivariable problem has been argued endlessly by politicians, but swarming allows a group of disparate voters to converge on an answer in seconds.

Here the swarm rejects the idea that either the states or the private insurance companies would be better positioned to enforce the “essential” healthcare regulations discussed above. But, what’s interesting to note about the swarm’s response, is just how little consideration these largely Independent voters gave to either the state or private options. The Decision Analysis Chart produced by our Swarm Insight(TM) portal makes this disparity quite clear. There is majority support for the Federal Government at the outset of the question, and that support only grows as the swarm converges on its answer.

So why then this rush to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? If coverage defined and protected under so-called Obamacare is “essential”, and voters aren’t convinced that the Graham Cassidy bill’s relegation of those protections to the jurisdiction of the state is seen as less appealing than preserving the Federal Government’s authority, why is it so important to pass this bill before the September 30th deadline? That was our researchers’ final question for the swarm.

Here is the complete look at the Swarm’s guide to healthcare:

To learn more about our Swarm A.I. technology,  check out Dr. Rosenberg’s TED talk below…

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