Two articles on the same story...

While reporting on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, journalist Steven Brill was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition that required heart surgery.

"There I was: a reporter who had made hospital presidents and hospital executives and health care executives and insurance executives sweat because I asked them all kinds of questions about their salaries and about their profit margins," Brill tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And now I was lying on a gurney in a hospital in real fear of my life."

Brill had a bubble on his heart that the doctors said had a 15 to 17 percent chance of bursting each year, he says. If it did, he would die. The experience, Brill says, helped him analyze health care from a patient's perspective.

"At that moment I wasn't worried about costs; I wasn't worried about a cost benefit analysis of this drug or this medical device; I wasn't worried about health care policy," Brill says. "It drove home to me the reality that in addition to being a tough political issue because of all the money involved, health care is a toxic political issue because of all the fear and the emotion involved."

Brill's surgery happened not long after he had written a special report for Time magazine investigating the inflated charges in hospital bills. The article Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us won a National Magazine Award. After winning the award, Brill ended up with pages and pages of his own inflated and confusing hospital charges.

"A patient in the American health care system has very little leverage, has very little knowledge, has very little power," Brill says.

Now Brill has written the book America's Bitter Pill about the political fights and the medical and pharmaceutical industry lobbying that made it difficult to pass any health care overhaul — and led to the compromises of the Affordable Care Act. The law enables millions more people to afford health insurance, he writes, but it also adds new layers of bureaucracy — and many confusing new regulations.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/01/...e-law-wont-work
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In an interview with NPR, Steven Brill, author of “America’s Bitter Pill,” slammed the White House for its Obamacare launch, saying there has “never been a group of people who more incompetently launched something.”

Brill’s premiere Obamacare critique, as he tells host Terry Gross, is that the health care overhaul is “emblematic of what’s eating away at our country,” pointing directly to the politics and the “challenge of governance” it presents. Brill also told NPR that President Obama was largely protected by the likes of Valerie Jarrett, and had no idea of the issues until they ultimately reared their head.

BRILL: In every respect, this whole saga of Obamacare, the politics of it, the bitter partisan of it, the lobbying and, in this case, the challenge of governance all are emblematic of what’s eating away at our country. The incompetence in the White House — there have never been a group of people who more incompetently launched something and it’s principally because the people in the administration who knew it was going wrong went to the president directly with memos in person, to his chief of staff and said ‘we need to bring people in from the outside to launch this,’ and the president was protected, mostly by Valerie Jarrett from doing anything. And, I guess one of the really sadder aspects of this is that nobody who knew it was going wrong spoke out and still hasn’t spoken out, even in the aftermath of the whole thing being a total bust, and for a whole year discrediting the notion that government can actually run a program.

GROSS: So you’re saying Obama was protected by his own people for knowing what was going wrong?

BRILL: He was protected, but you know what, at the end of the day he’s responsible. He kept getting all these reports, he kept getting all these green lights on his laptop on a grid, everything’s going great. Literally the night before the launch on October 1st, his chief of staff called a friend of his and said ‘we’re going to knock your socks off.’ Well, he was right about that. The president, whatever we can say about him on policy and on giving speeches, as a manager, he failed. He did not know what was going on in the single most important initiative of his administration.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/01/09/obamac...ng-potus-audio/