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.
