Thursday, December 10, 2015

If It's As Bad As This Article Says, I'm Not At All Surprised

Obamacare Is Now on Life Support:
Democrats gained the political muscle to push the Affordable Care Act (ACA) through Congress on three basic arguments.

First, they argued that the United States had too many uninsured people, with estimates ranging from 30 million to 45 million.

Second, the rise in costs for health care outstripped inflation, and the market required an intervention that would bend the cost curve downward.

Third, Democrats claimed that insurance companies made too much profit and shorted most consumers on care, while those with generous health plans – so-called “Cadillac plans” – drove up utilization rates and costs for everyone else.

The only solution for these ills was a massive government intervention, complete with mandates for all participants in the market, including providers, insurers, and consumers. Once government ran this market, Democrats promised, consumers would see their premiums decrease (by $2,500 a year, according to Barack Obama), insurers would gain access to vast numbers of new consumers who couldn’t get insurance before, and the lifting of cost burdens would spark a job-creation surge that would lift the economy.

Such were the promises of Obamacare five years ago. The reality began looking much different in the fall of 2013, when the first open-enrollment period turned into a disaster. Millions of insurance policies were canceled even though the health care exchanges failed to work properly.

In 2014, premiums spiked, and then in 2015 they exploded again along with deductibles so high that many decided not to be insured at all. Over half of Obamacare’s co-ops collapsed this year, most of them this fall, and now the providers who took their clients may end up stuck with the bills...

Still, as bad as the news has been over the past five years, the remaining illusions were shattered by the CBO and the White House itself this week. Obamacare didn’t make much of a dent in the uninsured rate, it has forced costs to rise faster than before, and it will kill millions of jobs that otherwise would be created.

“The labor force is projected to be about 2 million full-time-equivalent workers smaller in 2025 under the ACA than it would have been otherwise,” the CBO concludes in the latest analysis of Obamacare’s impact on the economy...

So let’s recap. Obamacare has depressed job growth, costs are escalating at a higher rate, barely a dent has been made in the numbers of uninsured, and insurers are either exiting the markets or failing altogether.
Who could possibly have predicted such a failure?

1 comment:

Ellen K said...

In short, everything we predicted has come to pass. ACA was voted on without true scrutiny, using cooked CBO numbers to make it appear deficit neutral. There were so many layers of free programs and special exemptions for pet causes and groups. Unions were largely exempt. And then there was the website fiasco. Nobody has explained why a Canadian company was used when there are hundreds of American companies fully capable of building and maintaining a website. Frankly that money seems to be more of a payback to the CEO of that company for being Michelle's college chum.