Mr. Obama oversold Obamacare
By Tom Quiner
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ-p29xEM0s&feature=player_embedded]
My wife and I own a small business. We carry a high-deductible health-savings account (HSA). To hold down the price of premiums, we essentially pay the first $5000 of our medical expenses.
I just got word that our premiums are going up another $600 this year on top of the $700 spike last year.
I’m paying $1300 more a year for health insurance since the Democratically-controlled Congress passed Obamacare.
Candidate Obama promised he would lower annual family health insurance premiums by $2500 by the end of his first term.
He hasn’t.
In fact, annual premiums have increased $2200 since he became president according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
I guess I should consider myself lucky. My premiums haven’t gone up as much as most, but that is become I essentially self-insure my first $5000 of coverage.
Why did Mr. Obama push so hard to pass what turned out to be the signature, if dubious, accomplishment of his presidency?
In addition to his claim that he would lower our premiums, he said the program would save the taxpayers money. The Democratic Triumvirate of Obama/Reid/Pelosi cooked the books when they presented their plan to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for financial scrutiny.
Based on assumptions they were compelled to accept, the CBO said Obamacare would reduce the federal deficit by $143 billion in the first ten years.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said we would have to read the 2000 + page document to learn what was in it.
As the bill was scrutinized after the fact, the truth came out. Obamacare is a sham.
Team Obama acknowledged that long term care component of the bill, called the Class Act, was financially unfeasible. They pulled it.
In his 2013 budget, Mr. Obama inserted an extra $111 billion in spending to help subsidize the law’s health insurance exchanges. So the price tag for the entire Obamacare boondoggle has just about doubled from what they promised it would cost. And what was that?
$940 billion over the decade.
And what does the CBO tell us it is going to cost us now that they’ve read what it really says?
$1.76 trillion (this is the current number, but it keeps getting revised upward).
Watch the video above from American Doctors 4 Truth for an entertaining explanation of the problems of Obamacare.
It gets worse. Mr. Obama said we could keep our existing policy if we preferred. It’s not working out that way. Companies are pulling out of the health insurance business because Obamacare limits how much profit they can make. Even more, a study by McKinsey & Co. last year reveals that up to half of employers plan to stop offering health insurance once Obamacare is fully implemented.
Key promises of Obamacare have been broken.
In light of the impending fiscal carnage of this bill; in light of the overwhelming unpopularity of the bill; in light of the infringement on our religious liberties imposed by this bill, there is but one logical action: repeal it.
Let’s start over and craft a bi-partisan, market-driven piece of legislation.
Obamacare has already failed.
Obamacare, like Romneycare, was focused on getting everyone insured, not on fostering competition and bringing costs down.
You have to use the power of the free market to bring costs down, which means consumer-based care with policies for sale across state lines, not employer-based or government-based health care. The former drives up costs, the latter leads to rationing.
The free market can’t function when the person using the service and the person paying for the service aren’t the same. Employer-based health care has driven up costs because when something is essentially free, more of it is consumed. The free market hasn’t failed, we haven’t given it a fair chance.
Obama isn’t the right person to fix health care in this country, but neither is Mitt Romney.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Imagine if the federal government forced health insurance to be purchased directly by consumers (rather than their employers); that we had to purchase a $5000 deductible HSA; and we could shop across state lines for health insurance products. What would happen to the cost of premiums? Would they go up or down? By the way, I’m not advocating a mandated $5000 deductible, not at all. But the hypothetical is interesting and I believe supports your contention that the key is free market solutions.
But the point is that someone should be able to choose a $5,000 deductible if that’s what works best for their family, as it does for yours. We all have that option with our car and home insurance. Health insurance companies should be able to offer a wide range of premium options with various coverage,deductible and co-pay options. This problem is so easily fixable, and it’s frustrating that we’re making it worse and moving in the wrong direction.
Can you fix my prior comment? I typed “ensured,” instead of “insured.” Thanks.
My husband and I also have a high-deductible policy, since it’s all we can afford. As a practical matter, this means we pay for everything out of pocket, since our expenses in any given year are never more than the $6000 deductible. Thank goodness we’re healthy and don’t need much in the way of medical care. But I’m enough of a congenital pessimist that I’m sure if we dropped the insurance (and don’t think we haven’t been tempted!), then the next day one of us would get hit by a truck, or find out we had some serious disease that was going to be hideously expensive to treat, and then we would end up losing our house and our savings and everything else we’ve worked for for the past 35 years.
Even with the high deductible, the monthly payments aren’t cheap. And they just keep going up, despite the fact that we never cost the insurance company anything. It’s depressing — especially when the problem could be largely solved by doing the one thing government has absolutely no interest in doing — getting the hell out of the way and letting the free market work.