Young mothers are delighted to find out that the new federal Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – provides free motorized breast pumps. Young adults up to age 26 can stay on their parent’s health insurance, presumably at a lower premium. Health insurance cannot be denied because of a pre-existing condition.
The benefits of Obamacare get a lot of attention.
The price for freebies like these is less well known: higher health insurance premiums, 20 new taxes (most on the “middle class”), chaos in the health insurance market, a looming doctor shortage, budget problems in the states, $480 billion taken out of Medicare, and employers dropping employee health plans and/or dropping full-time workers to part-time to avoid the new more expensive mandated health coverage.
Welcome to government run health care.
Note that Congress exempted itself (and the president) from Obamacare.
No member of Congress read the whole thing through. Nancy Pelosi famously warned that Congress would have to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it.
We are starting to find out what’s in it.
Obama promised that his law would provide 38 million uninsured with health insurance while at the same time lowering the cost and raising the quality of health care for everyone.
It was a promise that was too good to be true.
Obama’s own Health and Human Services Agency now admits that by 2016, 30 million people will still be uninsured, that cost of health care is still going up, and that health insurance premiums are going up at a faster rate than before Obamacare was enacted.
Already, increased costs have caused HHS bureaucrats to start demonizing groups of Americans.
If you are fat, or smoke, this is now everyone’s problem because your medical consequences are a cost to the system.
In a free society, you would make your own life decisions and live with the costs or benefits of the consequences. Not anymore.
The government counts on insurance premiums from the pool of the young and fit to subsidize the older and sick. That’s why there’s a mandate to buy health insurance even if you don’t want to.
Now if you are young, fit, but poor, the government will subsidize your insurance premium by raising taxes on medical innovation, successful people and tanning beds and by looting Medicare.
If you are young and fit and don’t buy health insurance with coverage defined by the HHS at a price defined by the insurance companies, the government will fine (oops, “tax”) you.
The “tax” is way less than paying for the insurance.
Since the government has guaranteed that insurance cannot be denied because of a pre-existing condition, the betting is that the young and fit will pay the lower fine if required and get the insurance only if something happens to require health care.
In other words, the pool of health insurance premium payers is going to be a lot smaller than required to subsidize those who cannot or will not pay.
While the pool of payers is already shrinking, the pool of takers is increasing.
Obamacare makes illegal immigrants ineligible for its benefits. But the comprehensive immigration reform proposal to be announced this week by the president would make illegal immigrants legal and therefore eligible for the subsidized health insurance.
Some government workers want in on the subsidized health insurance.
Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel already has a problem explaining why his city has the toughest gun control laws in the country but at the same time the most gun violence in the country.
Now Rahm faces a $1.2 billion payment in 2015 for Chicago’s retired workforce unfunded health benefits.
Chicago doesn’t have the money and the mayor’s commission has recommended that pre-Medicare retirees be dumped on the Illinois state insurance exchange created under Obamacare. An estimated 60 percent of these retirees would be eligible for health insurance subsidized by the federal taxpayer.
Chicago and its pension fund would thereby shift an estimated $23 billion in long-term liabilities from Chicago taxpayers to all of us.
Obamacare offers to subsidize the cost of setting up these state insurance exchanges for three years. After that, the feds will mandate the costs and state taxpayers will pick up most of the tab.
That’s why, at last count, 19 states have declined the fed’s offer.
Not California.
Despite admitting that implementing Obamacare in California could destabilize the state budget, Gov. Jerry Brown has pledged to make this a priority.
Maybe, like Rahm Emanuel, the governor’s ultimate plan is to dump the billions of unfunded liabilities in state and local government pension funds onto the federal government.
Miller, let me guess.... You think government should only run the military (until it is privatized). Right?
0 Replies
easyinsureme
1
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Wed 17 Apr, 2013 05:16 pm
@Miller,
Yes, It is forced healthcare. The Affordable Health Care Act, more commonly referred to as Obamacare, has a caveat in it that says people who make a certain amount of money must have health insurance of their own that meets a certain standard, or they will have to pay a certain amount more in taxes. It’s a pretty standard formula, and there’s not a lot of wiggle room; either people who make enough money to put them over the cut off will have health insurance and be exempt, or they won’t and there will be a penalty when it comes time to pay taxes.
0 Replies
Miller
0
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Wed 17 Apr, 2013 05:32 pm
There many taxpayers in Massachusetts who would rather pay the fine than pay for health insurance. I say" more power to them".
Obamacare may be dependent on insurance exchanges. A problem with these exchanges is that many of them will not insure an individual when out-of-state except for emergency care.
Thus, access to quality physicians, and physicans -of-choice is limited, to put it mildly.
No, when you file your state tax return, you must provide a form from your insurance company showing you are insured. If you do not, you simply pay a fine - you don't get insurance with it, it is just a fine sorta like a fine for speeding.
For some people that have been interviewed on the news, they explain the fine is less than the cost of health insurance so they simply pay the fine. For others, they try to get away without paying either.
The funny thing is when I get proof of insurance and also fill out the details on my tax return, it only asks for proof of my husband and me; they don't have anything where you need to show proof your children are insured.
No, when you file your state tax return, you must provide a form from your insurance company showing you are insured. If you do not, you simply pay a fine - you don't get insurance with it, it is just a fine sorta like a fine for speeding.
So it's only cheaper when they know that they'll won't get ill at all.
The funny thing is when I get proof of insurance and also fill out the details on my tax return, it only asks for proof of my husband and me; they don't have anything where you need to show proof your children are insured.
Same is here, since children are covered by their parents' mandatory health insurance.
The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.
The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care. Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy. If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:
1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of oher doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.
2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.
3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.
4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.
All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.
By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.
Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.
Item 2, this is what I saw in grad school some time ago, although I do not have any reason to think much has changed. In the school I attended, there appeared to be sixty or seventy first year med students walking around and all but one or two of them would have made perfectly good doctors, they were all very bright and highly motivated. The only way the school should have lost any of those kids was either they discovered they couldn't deal with the sight of blood in real life or six months later they changed their minds and went off to Hollywood to become actors or actresses; the school should never have lost more than ten percent of them. But they knew from day one that they were keeping 35% of that class.
That system says that you know several things about the guy working on your body: You know he's a survivor, and that's highly unlikely to be from being better qualified than 65% of the other students; You know he hasn't had enough sleep (he's doing his work and the work of that missing 65%); You know he's probably doing some sort of drugs to deal with the lack of sleep... One of my first steps as "health Tsar" or whatever would be to tell the medical schools that henceforth if they ever drop more than15% of an incoming class, they'll lose their accreditation.
Item 3. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. V., you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."
The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.
Item 4. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.
Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.
0 Replies
revelette
6
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Thu 19 Sep, 2013 07:43 am
@Miller,
Before Obama and democrats passed the Affordable Health Care law, republicans had a chance to put their input in, they chose not to, but rather chose to put out a lot of myths about death panels and the like. The one suggestion they put out about the health care mandate, they now oppose. Rather than simply wanting to turn the health care back to status quo they should be helping to make it a success and offer suggestions to improve it for the good of all us living in the US. If what you say is true, and I can't find it anywhere, then it will hardly be different as the working poor has been dependent on emergency care before Obamacare and we all have been footing bill this long while. I am hopeful that will change in near future if more states corporate.
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