According to a study done by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, ObamaCare’s $5 billion early-retiree reinsurance program could exhaust its funding well before the program expires at the end of 2013 — and, in the long run, it would provide strong incentives for employers to drop coverage for early retirees.
Americans now favor repeal by 23 percentage points (58 to 35 percent) — and nearly 50 percent of Americans now “strongly” favor repeal, compared to fewer than 30 percent who are “strongly” opposed.
If Senator Dianne Feinstein’s introduction of a bill allowing the federal government to regulate insurance rates is any indication, Congressional Democrats’ faith in ObamaCare’s ability to rein in soaring health costs — as they assured Americans it would do — already seems to be wavering.
In the wake of ObamaCare’s passage, few Democrats are willing to interact with voters in public settings. One swing-district ObamaCare-supporter, Rep. Tom Perriello (D, Va.) held 21 town-hall meetings last August but not a single one during the weeklong Memorial Day recess.
This week, we learned that the Obama administration is orchestrating a $125 million propaganda campaign to sell the recently enacted health-care law to the public. That effort will be funded by labor unions and other groups from the Democratic political orbit. It comes on top of the misleading government mailer sent to the nation’s seniors, at the expense of taxpayers, touting the supposed benefits of ObamaCare for the elderly. On Tuesday, the president himself will join the fray again to make the sales pitch, this time promoting the colossal waste of taxpayer money associated with $250 per senior bribes to be issued this summer and fall.
The problem the White House has, however, has never been insufficient public relations spin. The problem is the substance. Americans care deeply about their health care, and they have seen right through the Democratic rhetoric on ObamaCare from day one. They know that it is a poorly conceived experiment, built on the flawed assumption that the problems in U.S. health care can be solved with heavier regulation, subsidization, and micro-management from Washington, D.C.
In Medicare, the results of the new law will be disastrous. ObamaCare will cut payments to the private insurance component of the program (called Medicare Advantage, or MA) by nearly $200 billion over ten years. The chief actuary of the program says this cut will eventually drive 7 million seniors — many with low-incomes — out of the plan they would prefer to enroll in. And it will mean thousands of dollars in benefit reductions for every MA enrollee, beginning next year. These seniors won’t be silenced with patronizing and one-time checks. In addition, the new law imposes arbitrary price cutting for all manner of Medicare services, which the chief actuary says will harm access to care by forcing scores of institutions to stop taking Medicare beneficiaries.
Last week, we learned that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) has postponed issuing guidance on the ill-conceived “medical-loss ratio” requirement in the new law because, as passed by Congress, it will cause massive and unnecessary disruption to millions of current insurance enrollees. One estimate is that 1 to 2 million people with individual insurance will lose their coverage if the requirement is imposed because national insurers will be forced to exit the market to avoid large business losses.
The president has said repeatedly that Americans will get to keep the insurance they have today if they like it. But that’s quite clearly not going to be the case. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, of the American Action Forum, has released a new study that shows some 35 million Americans will get bumped from job-based coverage under the new law and be forced into the new government-managed system. That’s because the massive new subsidies promised by the government will make dropping insurance unavoidable for thousands of employers. He also predicts the migration out of employer plans will drive up the overall federal costs dramatically, adding another $500 billion over ten years to the costs projected by the Congressional Budget Office for the bill.
Perhaps that why CBO’s Director, Doug Elmendorf, is saying that the federal government’s health costs are still unsustainable, even after passage of the new law, despite repeated presidential promises that ObamaCare would solve our budget problems by painlessly “bending the cost curve.”
The truth is, the more we learn about ObamaCare, the worse it gets. It’s filled with budgetary gimmicks and flawed assumptions that will bankrupt the U.S. treasury. Its taxes will force deep cuts in employment in the medical device and other industries. Restaurants and other employers will have strong incentives to avoid hiring workers from low income households in order to lessen the burden from the law’s mandates and penalties. It will disrupt insurance for millions of Americans who are perfectly happy with the coverage they have today. And the government’s clumsy cost-cutting efforts will undermine the quality of American medicine.
Most Americans already instinctively understand all of this. But it’s also clear that the administration and its allies will spend millions trying to persuade them that up is down when it comes to health care. We have launched this web site to set the record straight. ObamaCareWatch.org pulls together all of the best evidence and analysis about the legislation, as well as relevant news items and commentary, in an accessible and searchable format for anyone to use as they need to. Our aim is to provide Americans with the facts so that they can hold those who sponsored and passed ObamaCare accountable for what they have done.
“‘Rarely is one afforded a glimpse into the dark heart of the contemporary “Heath Reform” project as unwittingly honest and searing as that provided by an exchange of opinions between Mark Thornton, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed regarding the FDA’s approval process for investigational cancer treatments, and a Dr. James Smith, replying in the Letters to the Editor page on May 13′”
“Towers Watson, a leading human resources consulting firm, has conducted a survey of 661 human resource and benefit specialists across America. While benefit professionals are still digesting the new law, the survey shows that they are even more skeptical of Obamacare than the public is.”
“Is the Pill preventive, in the sense meant when preventive medicine got debated during ObamaCare? Not at all. Democrats specifically called out early diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes….That never included an explicit argument that lowering the birth rate would be an overall cost-saver, or that it was a legitimate government interest to suppress the birth rate. “
Though ObamaCare’s “Cadillac plan” tax was designed to affect only employers with extravagant health benefit plans, an analysis by the global professional services company Towers Watson, using data from its 2010 Health Care Cost Survey, reveals that more than 60% of large employers’ health-care plans could be subject to this tax when it goes into effect in 2018.
Michigan, a state that Barack Obama won by 16 points and which hasn’t gone to a Republican presidential candidate in 22 years, opposes ObamaCare by 8 points — with voters under age-30 being opposed to it by more than 2-to-1.