Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Obamacare fails in 2017...Oh yes it does!


Obamacare was designed to fail…you do not believe me? It was designed by a failed congress run by failed Democratic Politians, It was paid for by a failed budget process (remember when Harry Reid Senator D Nevada would not let a budget come to the floor?), it was then deemed to be a tax instituted by the Supreme Court (Hey… I thought congress develops taxes). It’s gonna be bad!

A healthy debate: was Obamacare designed to fail?

Updated: FEBRUARY 9, 2016 — 11:36 AM EST

Philadelphia Inquirer Daily News

Point: Obamacare’s failures could be a design to promote single-payer

By Howard J. Peterson

Democratic socialist progressives, hard to know what term to use these days, unabashedly embrace single payer healthcare for the United States.  The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was passed by Congress with no Republican votes in 2010.  It didn’t achieve single payer.  However, an examination of how Obamacare has evolved might lead to the conclusion that it was designed to fail as a way to, ultimately, force a single payer system.

The only material success of Obamacare has been the expansion of Medicaid.  14M new people have been added to the Medicaid roles in states that adopted Medicaid expansion.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the number of uninsured citizens as of June 2015 has only declined by 10 million. So, if you add the growth of the population since 2014 (6M) to the decline in uninsured (10M) (6+10=16) and then subtract the 14M new Medicaid enrollees, the result is that only 2M people who were previously uninsured have gotten insurance through the federal and state exchanges. 

The exchanges have produced no material benefit.  Therefore, one might conclude that these exchanges were simply established to destroy commercial insurance markets. The exchanges have required minimum benefits some of which make little sense (64 year-old women being required to carry OB coverage), dramatically increased co-payments and deductibles, increased overall insurance plans rates rather than reduce them by the promised $2,500, escalated taxes/penalties for not participating and driven insurance companies out of the exchanges given their mounting losses and severed the ability for many people to see your own doctor. 

So, if one were a conspiracy theorist it would go something like this: the Democrats knew there would be growth in Medicare driven by the aging population. Obamacare focused on the expansion of Medicaid with a plan to increase dependency on federal funding.  The exchanges only purpose was the destruction of the commercial insurance market.  Given these factors and the growing national debt due to Obamacare and the fact that 32M U.S. citizens still remain uninsured a compelling case could be made to move to a single payer system as the only and obvious solution.  Great, the VA for everybody.

Democratic socialist progressives, I believe, would applaud the shift of the entire healthcare sector (17% of our economy) to federal government control.  Combine that with a carbon tax and existing social programs and this positions the federal government to define pretty much all of how we live our lives. 

Contrary to this direction, we have enough money currently within healthcare to pay for the clinical needs of our entire population.  The real problem is not cost; its utilization.  The United States provides most healthcare services at two times the rate of other countries (MRIs, orthopedic implants, tonsillectomies).  We do this because of the flawed incentives of our payment system.  We could fix this by changing payment incentives and preserving a commercial insurance market.   But those who crafted Obamacare may be more interested in controlling the citizens than solving the problem.

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