Before the passage of ObamaCare’s 2,400 pages of coercive mandates and profligate spending, the federal government had already largely wrecked the market for individually purchased insurance, in three interconnected ways.
First, it had effectively established two different health insurance markets—employer-based and individually purchased—by treating them differently in the tax code. Second, it had given an attractive tax break for employer-based insurance while denying it for individually purchased insurance (except for the self-employed). Third, having effectively split the market in two while favoring the employer-based side, it had made it hard for people to move from the employer-based market to the individual market, as it had allowed insurers to treat previously covered conditions as “preexisting.”
A popular conservative alternative, then, would repeal every word of ObamaCare while fixing this longstanding inequity in the tax code.
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Health jobs grew more than two thirds faster than non-health jobs in March, they comprised 37,000 (17 percent) of nonfarm civilian jobs added (215,000).
There is significant increase in health services jobs under Obamacare. It is unlikely we will bend the curve of health spending as long as we keep adding relatively unproductive health services jobs.
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After six years of Obamacare and three years of the exchanges Americans have learned a few lessons. The healthcare.gov disaster was due to the complexity of the website, an awful procurement system, and lack of adequate management by the administrationg. Establishing an insurance company is more than just paying claims, as you can see with the failure of half of the co-op insurers around the country. Finally, people don’t want to spend a lot of money on insurance.
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Obamacare created a system that actually made insurance more expensive, decreasing access to the poor and sick, while pricing out average Americans from affordable health care coverage. Millions more have been added to Medicaid, millions have seen double or triple their annual premiums and millions have opted not to be insured at all.
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Only the top five insurers have profits in excess of $1 billion. All the others had 2014 profits of less than $300 million. But the top five also have membership of at least 20 million, with Humana being the lowest (21.4 million) and CIGNA and UnitedHealthGroup having the highest (86 and 85 million members worldwide, respectively).
When you divide a figure measured in billions by membership measured in many millions, the resultant is rather modest. The average Fortune 500 health insurer earned profits of only $51 per member in 2014. Thus we could trim the monthly health insurance premium by about $4.25 were we to confiscate all those “obscene profits” and give them back to plan members.
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Highmark Health lost $590 million in its health plans that were sold on the ACA exchange in 2015. Highmark is still owed $500 million under the risk-corridor program, and HHS has said it will find a way to fund the program. Highmark Health CEO, David Holmberg said Highmark has met with government officials “regularly to discuss how they plan to honor their commitment.”
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Obama promised that Obamacare would “save all of us money and reduce pressures on emergency rooms all across the country.” However, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows, that by doling out insurance coverage to millions more people without doing anything to address America’s growing doctor shortage, the president’s health reform law may make the ER crisis even worse.
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The Affordable Care Act has created many problems and the American people are left with rising costs, and higher taxes, mountains of red tape, and arrogant bureaucratic attacks on personal and religious liberty.
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Most of the remaining non-elderly uninsured people in the U.S. likely won’t gain coverage, a new study released this week suggests.
The study, from the Urban Institute says that while some higher-income people who are uninsured will surely gain coverage as the penalties for not having insurance increase, the possibility for increased coverage is actually lower among those who have higher incomes than those who are eligible for financial assistance to cover insurance.
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The Congressional Budget Office projects millions of workers will leave employer-sponsored health plans over the next decade because of ObamaCare.
Some will opt to go on Medicaid, but others will be kicked off their company plans by employers who decide not to offer coverage anymore, according to a new CBO report titled, “Federal Subsidies for Health Insurance Coverage for People Under Age 65: 2016 to 2026.”
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