Obamacare was sold to America on a set of false premises. The most famous of them?
“no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
And the fools believed him.
And he repeated that promise at least 36 times.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/qpa-5JdCnmo[/youtube]
That promise was worth as much as any Obama assurance- absolutely nothing.
Here’s another:
“If you’ve got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan,” Mr. Obama said in his Oct. 15, 2008 debate against McCain. “The only thing we’re going to try to do is lower costs so that those cost savings are passed onto you. And we estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year.”
He spit that promise out a lot.
Watch:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/66bgpRRSDD4[/youtube]
And then Obama took the stupid pill. The BIG one.
“…your employer, it’s estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3000% which means they could give you a raise.”
And the fools believed him.
Now Obamacare hell awaits all of us. Firstly, the rate increases.
Health Insurers Seek Hefty Rate Boosts
Major insurers in some states are proposing hefty rate boosts for plans sold under the federal health law, setting the stage for an intense debate this summer over the law’s impact.
In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016. The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase. In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products. Moda Health, the largest insurer on the Oregon health exchange, seeks an average boost of around 25%.
All of them cite high medical costs incurred by people newly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act.
Under that law, insurers file proposed rates to their local regulator and, in most cases, to the federal government. Some states have begun making the filings public, as they prepare to review the requests in coming weeks. The federal government is due to release its rate filings in early June.
Insurance regulators in many states can force carriers to scale back requests they can’t justify. The Obama administration can ask insurers seeking increases of 10% or more to explain themselves, but cannot force them to cut rates. Rates will become final by the fall.
Experts see big price hikes for Obamacare
The cost of Obamacare could rise for millions of Americans next year, with one insurer proposing a 50 percent hike in premiums, fueling the controversy about just how “affordable” the Affordable Care Act really is.
The eye-popping 50 percent hike by New Mexico insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield is an outlier, and state officials may not allow it to go through. But health insurance experts are predicting that premiums will rise more significantly in 2016 than in the first two years of Obamacare exchange coverage. In 2015, for example, premiums increased by an average of 5.4 percent, according to PwC’s Health Research Institute.
The premium increases come at a tenuous time for Obamacare, which remains under fire from a Republican Congress that wants to repeal the law, while a Supreme Court ruling on federal subsidies for the health insurance looms in June as well.
“Insurers seem to be reporting higher trend, which means they are seeing bigger increases in health care costs,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “But really what’s going on here is they now have data showing what the risk pool looks like. Initially in 2014 they were completely guessing about who was going to enroll and how much health care they were going to use.”
Many plans haven’t yet made public their proposed rates; Monday is the deadline for publishing and providing an explanation for rate hikes of at least 10 percent. None announced so far is as dramatic as the New Mexico plan, although a few others are also quite sharp.
We here predicted this a long time ago. There is simply no way you’re going to eliminate pre-existing conditions, add illegals to the rolls of free health care, add millions of new Medicare patients and lower health care costs.
Impossible.
And still the fools believed.
The left continues to produce meaningless polls showing how satisfied people are with their Obamacare. That succeeds because people still do not understand the difference between care and coverage. They may be covered but when they need care and those deductibles kick in, they’re not going to be “satisfied” for long.
I wrote about that back in 2013:
For many, rates might come down, but the deductibles are the rest of the story and they are onerous. Obama supporters do not understand the difference between coverage and care. Getting coverage is easy. They are going to find out that getting care is expensive.
And getting sick will kill you.
And it comes to pass:
Democrats see skimpy insurance as the next health care issue
—A Commonwealth Fund study found that 31 million adults were underinsured last year. Half of them had problems with medical bills or medical debt. Seven million were underinsured due to high deductibles alone. “The steady growth in the proliferation and size of deductibles threatens to increase underinsurance in the years ahead,” the study concluded.
—A study by the advocacy group Families USA found that one-quarter of the people with individual health insurance policies went without care in 2014 because they could not afford the out-of-pocket costs. The study singled out high deductibles.
—The Center for American Progress, a think tank often aligned with the White House, found that employers have been shifting a disproportionate burden of health care costs onto workers. As a result, the report said, employees and their families have not shared in the benefits of a prolonged lull in medical inflation. The group recommended several policy changes, including rebates for workers under certain conditions.
democrat Jim McDermott admits to the deceit:
“We’ve got some 17 million more people covered … but they can’t access the care they seem to be entitled to,” McDermott said. “It costs too much to use the care. That’s the deceptive part about it.”
Deceptive? Sure. McDermott and his execrable brethren wrote this thing and passed this thing. If it is “deceptive” it is because Obama and his party are deceptive. Curiously, democrats see this as a campaign issue, despite their having created and nurtured the monster.
The full deceit of the left now is coming into focus. Obamacare isn’t an end unto itself. It is the beginning of the end. It is foundation upon which the new socialist utopian state will be built following the dismantling of the United States.
Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate’s most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. “The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future,” Harkin told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in December 2009. “But if we don’t have the starter home, we’re never going to be able to put those additions on.”
Harkin’s view prevailed, and many Democrats came to view Obamacare as a starter home. Now, even though the Affordable Care Act still faces an uncertain future in the courts, they want to start building the additions.
And it means more taxes and more flesh from those who produce to be eaten by those who do not:
Republicans have long predicted the increase in deductibles. But most analyses from liberal groups pay scant notice to the effect that Obamacare’s edicts are having on deductibles. Instead, groups on the left like the Center for American Progress are coming up with proposals for new mandates, like more free preventive services and a “shared savings rebate,” in which employers would be forced to turn over some healthcare payments to employees, as solutions to the problem.
There is even more hell to come. Doctors are going to quit the profession at an accelerating pace, in large part because of the Obamacare EHR mandate:
As one of them wrote, “My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn’t stand everything else.” By which he meant “a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies, and lawyers … progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations,” topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than “billing and legal documents” — and degraded medicine.
I hear this everywhere. Virtually every doctor and doctors’ group I speak to cites the same litany, with particular bitterness about the EHR mandate. As another classmate wrote, “The introduction of the electronic medical record into our office has created so much more need for documentation that I can only see about three-quarters of the patients I could before, and has prompted me to seriously consider leaving for the first time.”
It achieves absolutely nothing but the costs are onerous:
The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “it just won’t save billions of dollars” — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — “and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.
It’s 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.
That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by some larger entity.
And if doctors refuse, they are punished with reduced fees.
We’re not done yet.
Eventually the left will push for a single payer system and then to reduce costs further a liberal government would turn to the Disney model: eliminate the Americans and replace them with cheap imported H1B foreign labor.
Cheap imported medical labor will be imported to cut costs. Your child’s brain surgery will be done by an H1B immigrant with a degree from somewhere you’ve never heard of. The best and brightest will have no interest in investing gargantuan sums of money and incurring galactic amounts of debt to work for what doctors in India are paid. The doctor doing your daughter’s pelvic exam might have been picking lettuce a year before.
You Obama voters- want to know what you’re destroying? Go here. See where the highest cancer survival rates in the world are. You have voted to disincentivize the provision of the highest quality of care. Congratulations.
We’re still not done.
Having those medical records online means one thing. They’re going to be hacked. As doctors we are subject to HIPAA laws that are supposed to guard your privacy.
You can kiss that goodbye.
Having your records hacked means the world will know about your penile implant, your daughter’s genital warts, your son’s drug addiction and your wife’s treatment for alcohol addition and for depression. Right now there are cretins who post the personal information of others and demand payment for its removal from their site. Imagine the same thing happening with your medical records.
It IS going to happen and when it happens to you, thank Barack Insane Obama and the democrat party.
And to think that the risk corridors haven’t expired yet and the big business mandate hasn’t taken effect. They occur after Obama is out of office. As I said, Obama is leaving a huge pile of sh*t for his successor.
Welcome to Hell.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.
