By now,most Americans are beginning to understand that when President Obama told Americans that if they liked their doctor, their present health plan, they'd be able to keep it, it simply wasn't true.
However, as we're now finding out, it goes far beyond that. The president deliberately lied, knowingly lied, along with his team.
In another, astonishing random act of journalism, NBC, of all places revealed that ObamaCare was deliberately constructed to destroy the health coverage of millions of Americans and force them on to government exchanges, with much less coverage and far higher premiums. And this president knew it all along:
Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a “cancellation” letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience “sticker shock.”
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be “grandfathered,” meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don’t meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, “40 to 67 percent” of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, “the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.”
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Yet President Obama, who had promised in 2009, “if you like your health plan, you will be able to keep your health plan,” was still saying in 2012, “If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
“This says that when they made the promise, they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” said Robert Laszewski, of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a consultant who works for health industry firms. Laszewski estimates that 80 percent of those in the individual market will not be able to keep their current policies and will have to buy insurance that meets requirements of the new law, which generally requires a richer package of benefits than most policies today.
Actually, Laszewski estimates that as many as 16 million Americans will lose their health insurance because of ObamaCare.
Note the part I emphasized.Any changes made to your existing policy after March 23, 2010 when this tyranny became law disqualified it to be grandfathered, even if they were choices you made yourself, such as eliminating coverage for maternity care if you or your spouse was past childbearing age, eliminating an adult child from your policy because he or she obtained his or her own insurance, or increasing the co-pay for yourself and your employees slightly to keep costs down or to add more employees to your policy. It doesn't matter...even if you are perfectly satisfied with your coverage as it is, your insurance company will be told your policy doesn't meet ObamaCare standards and that cancellation letter will go out informing you that you no longer have health insurance come January 2014.
The Democrats are busily spinning this and trying to blame the insurances companies, since the companies are the ones issuing the cancellation letters. But the truth of the matter is they have little choice in the matter. Unless you are employed by a very large company or government agency (like a city or state bureaucracy) that can afford to absorb the expense of compliance with ObamaCare's arcane requirements because they can spread the cost out among a large group of employees, or unless your employer is politically connected enough to get a waiver or a subsidy like members of the governing class, you are likely to lose your insurance because private companies will be unable to absorb the cost of insuring small groups or families with individualized coverage.
Once you're forced to shop the exchanges, you'll discover what so many Americans already have... the sticker price of ObamaCare's Bronze coverage,the cheapest available with the highest deductible and the lowest sticker price is going to cost a family of five, two adults and three children, in excess of $20,000 per year. And that's a conservative estimate, guaranteed to go up as more and more healthy young adults opt to pay the penalty and the system needs more taxpayer dollars to cover the Medicaid patients whom qualify for the subsidies.The Medicaid patients signing up for ObamaCare in droves, and are the vast majority of those signing up for the exchanges. There's always an unlimited demand for free stuff at someone else's expense.
That also applies if you are fortunate enough to get your insurance through a very large company or government agency. At present, you're able to keep your present insurance,but your time is coming. While you may not lose your insurance outright, at least at first, you can expect vast increases in your co-payments to cover the cost of ObamaCare compliance.
Even worse, since ObamaCare unlike most current insurance policies does not allow any payments to 'out of network' doctors whatsoever, all it's going to take is a heart attack, a car accident or a similar emergency where immediate treatment is required at the closest available facility to put the average American who is forced to buy 'coverage' through ObamaCare into bankruptcy. That alone should blow the White House claims that the cancellations are due to insurance companies declining to meet standards for 'increased coverage' out of the water.
ObamaCare's failure is what was planned from the start, with the resulting misery and chaos ending with millions of desperate Americans being herded in single payer and the Sovietization of America's healthcare.Even the Medicaid patients who are happily signing up for their free coverage have no clue about what is ultimately in store for them.
The president bloviated a great deal about being a 'warrior for the middle class' during the 2012 campaign. Given what he knew about ObamaCare at the time, the term 'rapist' would have been more appropriate. Including the parts about the desire for power, domination and control. We've already seen how the president used the IRS to attack his political enemies. Imagine what will happen when they have access to all your data and can decide who gets a medical procedure and how long they have to wait to receive it based on how you voted or whom you donated to.
No wonder the president lied about it.
Here's another thing to consider. The president has the power to call up the HHS and instruct them to change the regulations and honor the promise he made again and again for two years. He isn't doing this because he was always determined to break that promise.
And that's illustrative of one of the main problems with the current occupant of the Oval Office, something that comes up again and again. He has no moral core, no standards of what most of us would refer to as common decency. It's a common thread running through his stance on infanticide, his use of the IRS as his political goon squad, the misuse of a trillion dollars worth of 'stimulus' to pay off his political allies, his cavalier ignoring of Federal Law, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the myriad of other scandals swirling around the Obama White House. And it runs through ObamaCare as well.
"Obamacare's failure is what was planned from the start..." If the health care plan is truly about power and control for Mr. Obama and his team, then it seems a mystery to me that it would be deliberately designed to fail. If ACA fails, then quite the opposite would likely ensue. It would mean less power and control for team Obama and might even adversely affect government power in general.
ReplyDeleteAfter a failure of this magnitude assuming it really does fail along the magnitude that some people seem to think that it will/is failing, it seems unlikely that anyone would trust Mr. Obama with any thing again and they would much more wary than they currently are to trust the government. Perhaps some of the low information voters might still trust him to run a single payer system after this.
If the end goal is a single payer health system, the mid step of ACA was/is unnecessary. There was/is enough support among Republicans to get such a measure passed into law. All of these things like "reconciliation" and locking Republicans out of the room when passing it would have been unnecessary.
The main problem with the US healthcare system is the exorbitant cost associated with it. ACA does nothing to address this and makes it worse. This is why it is opposed. Additionally no one knew what was in the bill when it was passed.
If the US is serious about addressing its problems, a good place to start would be by studying Canada our neighbor to the north. As I understand it, they have a single payer system that is far better even than the one we had prior to ACA. Additionally a bit off topic but Canada only spends a fraction of what the US spends on military expenditures and it does not have forces stationed all around the world where they are unable to adequately defend their homeland.
While Canada is well respected around the world, the US is almost universally reviled. The US should closely study Canada in terms of its health care system, its economic policies, and its foreign policies and try to implement as much as possible. We likely will not be able to implement every thing Canada does as we are a different country but studying Canada would be a great place to star. Canadians are generally wealthier than Americans, have access to better health care than Americans, have more economic opportunities than do typical Americans, and Canada is respected internationally. America is not. Perhaps we could learn something from Canada.
What? You mean Obamacare ISN'T the greatest thing since sliced bread? (Yes, my premium just tripled and yes, I am bitter about it. What 51-YO menopausal woman should HAVE to have and pay for maternity coverage?!)
ReplyDeleteI disagree with you that ObamaCare wasn't engineered to fail on purpose, Poster. So does Harry Reid and a host of other Democrats, all of whom have said how much they wanted single payer but the votes just weren't there for it.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm aware they wanted a single payer system. Most of America wants a single payer system. This was the case even before ObamaCare came along and is still the case. If ObamaCare does turn out to be the epic fail that many "experts" seem to be predicting, I don't see how anyone is going to trust team Obama to manage health care or any thing else for that matter.
ReplyDeleteFailure in this arena makes a single payer less likely not more likely. Also, there's the matter of Mr. Obama's ego. I don't think his ego would allow him to design something designed to fail. If the purpose was/is to transfer more power to himself and his cronies, then that makes sense but this only works if the plan succeeds. If it fails, it is a loss for single payer health care and it is a bigger loss for Mr. Obama and his team. Single payer health care would likely recover but Mr. Obama likely never would recover politically.
If the votes were not there for single payer health care, either Mr. Reid did not push for them or he is lying. Lying is nothing new for politicians of all stripes. I lean in the direction he is lying. After all needed Republican votes have always been there for a single payer health care system. It seems unlikely they just suddenly went away.
Sorry for the length of the post. If single payer is the goal, the "stepping stone" of ObamaCare is not necessary. Simply go to single payer straight away and pick off the Republican votes you need to pass it and avoid a filibuster. Given the popularity of such a system among the electorate, it would have been among the easiest things for a politician to do.
With that said a number of liberal commentators, while admitting to the failures of ACA and blaming team Obama for them, they do see the "silver lining" for them at least in that this could lead to a single payer health care system. It does not help Mr. Reid though, as he's to close ACA to benefit.
Essentially no one who participated in ACA will be able to have any thing to do with designing the single payer health care system. In fact, if it fails in a manner that many "experts" are predicting this failure, the lies associated with it, and the various NSA scandals specifically involving European "allies" will make it problematic at best for Mr. Obama to remain out of prison.
It seems unlikely that a politician would design a system that was supposed to fail, damaging his credibility beyond repair, and risking prison time in order to get to a place (single payer health care) that most Americans would support or it would not take much convincing to get them there!!
Maybe there's some grand plan here to blame the Republicans for ACA's failure. It'd be a bit difficult since they were shut out of the process but not impossible I suppose. This would be about the only way that Mr. Obama and the Democrats could maintain enough credibility to have any part in developing the single payer system you suggest they are actually striving for.
When single payer health care becomes a reality, I'd suggest looking at the Canadian system and trying to implement as much of it as we can. According to most reports it seems to be far better than the one America had before ACA. Perhaps this is why the Republican leadership vehemently opposed tea party efforts to derail ACA. Their resistance seems to have been against single payer health care all together.
The Republican leadership may have plans to introduce a single payer health care system of their own and resistance to this needed to be quelled within Republican ranks.
'Most of America wants a single payer system' - do you have any evidence whatsoever to back up that statement?
ReplyDeleteThe evidence for the claim is twofold. 1.)Observe the voting patterns of the people and how they answer various interview questions when posed. From this you will realize that America is politically a left of center nation. 2.)In my career path it is vitally important that I gain all relevant information. In order to do this, I need to be able to ascertain the correct information from how people answer various questions. These people tend to be VERY, VERY Conservative fiscally, socially, and in voting patterns. Furthermore they tend to strongly support the principles advocated by tea party type individuals. A majority of these people either would support single payer health care or could be persuaded to IF it could be demonstrated how the plan will lower the exorbitant cost. This was true in 2010 and is still true today. If staunch conservatives were/are ready for single payer health care, then it seems reasonable that a majority of Americans are.
ReplyDeleteIf the idea behind ObamaCare is/was to gain power for team Obama and his supporters, the law makes sense only IF it works. If it does not work, team Obama's credibility is damaged very likely beyond repair, the electorate is less likely to trust him, his team, or his party with any thing of this magnitude ever again. Additionally having witnessed a government failure of this magnitude the American people might be less willing to embrace the idea of single payer health care than they were in 2010.
Assuming the goal really is single payer health care the intermediate step of ObamaCare would have been unnecessary. Simply go straight to it, market it, and pick off the Republicans needed to pass it and avoid a filibuster.
The intermediate step undermines the ultimate goal in this case!! Doesn't make sense. Maybe they want single payer health care introduced by the Republicans, as they would not be trusted after failure of intermediate step of ObamaCare. This does not seem likely either. Also, there's mr. Obama's vast ego which further makes it unlikely that he is going to deliberately design something to fail.
I think we both agree that ObamaCare is destructive on so many levels it's hard to know where to even start and this law needs to be opposed with every measure possible.
Considering the historically low turnout in 2012 as well as the fact almost half of America pays no taxes, I think it's a stretch to say Americans 'want' single payer, assuming a lot of them even know what it is.
ReplyDeleteBTW, some anonymous troll posted a comment I didn't print (I don't post deliberate disinformation, especially from 'Anonymous') with polls 'showing' a slim majority of Americans want single payer.
Only thing was, everything cited was from two partisan sites advocating for this, the polls were as much a ten years old, many of the people conducting the polls have a history of cooking them and there were no mechanics shown. I think you've seen me take these apart before.
Plus, looking at the questions and the way they were phrased made it obvious a lot of the respondents were deliberately gamed, as they frequently are in agenda driven polls of this sort.
If I took a poll in a low income urban neighborhood populated by ObamaBot Democrats, you can bet they'd want single payer. There's unlimited demand for free stuff someone else pays for.
I doubt Americans as a whole are all that enthusiastic about Sovietizing the American health care system.
Regards,
Rob