Posted on 04/01/2014 4:11:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
Should Congress repeal Obamacare?
If you had asked that before the botched Affordable Care Act rollout, I would have had a hard time answering yes. I didn't see how the scheme could work, but I also believed that Washington owed the millions of Americans who I was told had been waiting desperately for years for guaranteed health care.
Now I say, "What's in a name?" There's no need for a repeal when Washington is bound to revamp the law. The reason: Consumers aren't buying it.
According to the White House, more than 6 million people have signed onto Obamacare exchanges. Problem: The law kicked close to 5 million Americans off their private health care plans. Also, the administration says it doesn't know how many new plan members actually are paying their premiums, so that 6 million figure could be highly inflated.
At best, more than 1 million extra Americans got new private coverage, while 5 million individual policyholders got kicked off their old plans. Some won't have access to the doctors they were promised they could keep.
For many, the new plans are less affordable than their old plans. Industry graybeard Robert Laszewski found that many exchange providers "are just re-enrolling their old customers at higher rates." Call it the Less Affordable Care Act.
Individuals who qualify for federal subsidies probably will pay lower premiums, but only because taxpayers are subsidizing their plans. How is that more affordable for America?
Obamacare also expanded Medicaid coverage for 7 million uninsured Americans. Thing is, President Barack Obama didn't need to upend the private market in order to expand Medicaid coverage. The same goes for the highly popular but utterly nonsensical provision that allows adult children to stay on their parents' health plans until they turn 26.
Already the Democrats are gutting Obamacare. The administration has delayed provisions 38 times, by the Wall Street Journal editorial page's count. The White House even asked insurers to continue providing those "substandard" plans it had banned. Six Democratic senators have come up with a plan to offer consumers more choices, spur competition and increase affordability.
On "Fox News Sunday," one of the six authors, Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, essentially declared the Affordable Care Act dead. "There's no such thing as Obamacare," he said. "You can't sign up for Obamacare. You're signing up for an Anthem policy or an Aetna policy or a WellPoint policy. It's private insurance."
The private market has had many drawbacks but one salvation: Until Obamacare, people were free to refuse to pay for a bad deal.
Months ago, reader Bob Duste of Glen Ellen, Calif., wrote to tell me that under Obamacare, his premiums had doubled while his deductible went up by 25 percent. His family can take the hit, he wrote, but he was "disillusioned with the efficacy of most government programs that end up being forced upon the unwilling as opposed to a last resort for the downtrodden and truly indigent."
Simply put, the Democrats didn't know what they were doing, but that didn't stop them from forcing their magical thinking on people who didn't want it.
Then you missed this doozy in line 3:
... I also believed that Washington owed the millions of Americans who I was told had been waiting desperately for years for guaranteed health care.
To hell with any other effect it may have. Sticking their hands deeper into our pockets seems to be their only concern.
Old people are the most affluent segment of the market, and therefore should be the most able to afford the healthcare they need. But with all of the forces outside of the doctor and patient at play here, healthcare costs are so far out of line with reality no one can possibly pay their own way.
Its these forces - created by tort law, bureaucrats, special political interests - that must be dealt with before a realistically affordable system can be reinstated.
Unfortunately the only way to deal with these problems is to blast em out. They'll never loosen their grip.
I don't think anyone has realized the huge financial burden that is being put on the upcoming generation of American workers who will feed government bureaucracy with their necessarily increasing tax dollars.
The big lie told through the media was the line about 30 million uninsured people clamoring for insurance. If that was even close to true the sign ups would be in the 60 or 7o million range already. Also, when it comes to acute or emergency care, no one has even gone without in America, insured or not. In the past if someone had to go to emergence and was not able to pay there were numerous programs set up to pay the hospitals back enough to stay solvent; some exceptions did exist along the southern border where people came across for the day to get treatment and the burden was too much to bear.
Now we have a big percentage of the population moving to social security that was once supported by a 20:1 worker ratio. Those people are drawing money out of an alleged pool that is now down to as low as 12:1 and going lower. Those people also will not need to buy Obama insurance because of Medicare. The young fools who supported the community organizer are in for a very rude awakening.
That’s a great idea. Politically, it would never get off the ground.
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