Democrats are jumping on the bandwagon to avoid a train wreck.

 By Tom Quiner

The damaging reality of Obamacare is here.

Even Democrats who helped write the sprawling 2700 page legislation are characterizing the final implementation of the bill as a “train wreck.” Those are the words of Max Baucus (D, Montana) who helped write the monstrosity.

Even Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid, agreed, although Mr. Reid’s remedy was “more money.” Reid says we need more money, more taxes to get this boondoggle fully launched.

Nothing new there.

There is so much wrong with the legislation. Republicans warned of the costs and flaws of the plan, and there are many.

Newt Gingrich pointed out one simple flaw: we’re going to need a ton of new doctors to accommodate the demands of Obamacare. It doesn’t look like we’re going to have enough doctors to do all the things the law demands.

A key point of Obamacare was to get more people health insurance. Some 42 million were uninsured depending on who you listened to. Obamacare won’t get them all insurance, but more will be insured.

That means we’re going to need more doctors.

But Obamacare doesn’t create more doctors.

It gets worse. It requires a long list of “free” preventative screenings in health insurance plans. To name a few …

• “FREE”  annual well woman visit,
• “FREE” birth control, including oral contraception and IUDs,
• “FREE” HIV screening and counseling,
• “FREE” sexually transmitted infection counseling,
• “FREE” screening for gestational diabetes,
• “FREE” breastfeeding consultation and supplies, including breast pumps, and
• “FREE” screening and counseling for domestic violence.

This is but a small list of the “FREE” preventative screenings mandated by Obamacare.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Of course, there’s no free lunch. But that’s not the point. The point is this: there aren’t enough hours in the day for doctors to do all of this preventative work AND take care of people already sick.

Economists at Duke University studied the ramifications of these Obamacare mandates. By their calculations, the average primary care doc would have to spend 7.5 hours each and every day simply providing these mandated wellness screenings for patients who are primarily healthy!

So much for taking care of sick people.

By all accounts, more and more doctors want to get out of the business due to Obamacare, so the numbers may actually end up being worse.

Who will get hurt the most by the mock benevolence of this aspect of Obamacare? The poor; the elderly; all those on government policies that pay below market value.

Doctors have to be practical. If they have decreasing hours to take care of sick folks, they have to set aside their limited hours in a day to care for their best-paying patients to keep their practice afloat, or face catastrophic loss of revenues .

The most vulnerable will be most harmed by the supposed benefit of mandated preventative screening unless we see a dramatic infusion of more doctors into the system.

That is not happening.

Keep in mind, this is but one small issue. The USA Today reported on even more in today’s edition:

• Daniel Kessler of Stanford estimates that 10 million people — about two-thirds of the market that is low- or average-risk — will see higher insurance bills for 2014.
• One insurer, WellPoint, found that for 11 states, small-group premiums are expected to increase by 13% to 23% on average.
• The Congressional Budget Office reported in February that “in 2019, an estimated 12 million people who would have had an offer of employment-based coverage under prior law will lose their offer under current law.” That estimate means ObamaCare will actually reduce health care coverage for millions of Americans.
• A recently released study in the New England Journal of Medicine by a group of the nation’s top health policy scholars based on Oregon’s Medicaid expansion — one whose first-year results were used by proponents of ObamaCare to expand Medicaid nationwide — ultimately found that expanding Medicaid had no measurable impact on people’s health. It turns out that even the very people who put this law on the books don’t like finding out what’s in a bill after they have passed it.

Max Baucus sees the train wreck coming. He’s jumping on the anti-Obamacare bandwagon early to try to distance himself from the carnage when the little guys once again get hurt by the imperious technocrats of the Left.