A review of this year’s polling data reveals that Gallup does not provide the most accurate gauge of ObamaCare’s popularity.
Congress claimed that ObamaCare would be paid for largely by cutting roughly $1 trillion from Medicare over ObamaCare’s real first ten years (2014 to 2023) and $455 billion through 2019 alone, but Congress’s latest game of kick-the-can-down-the-road suggests that these cuts might not get made, in which case ObamaCare would cause deficits to rise by about $1 trillion over a decade.
Despite the publicity it has received, the official estimate of the White House Office of Management and Budget is that not even one in every thousand Americans will be impacted by ObamaCare’s “patient’s bill of rights” — and this disclosure stands in stark contrast to the administration’s estimate that ObamaCare could cause more than half of all Americans with employer-based health plans to lose their current plan.
ObamaCare, with its various new or increased taxes on middle-class Americans, would violate many times over President Obama’s pledge to not raise “any form of taxes” on those making less than $250,000.
When it comes to ways to make coverage available to uninsured Americans with expensive preexising conditions, high-risk pools would cost less than one-tenth as much as ObamaCare, wouldn’t raise everyone else’s premiums, wouldn’t decimate the private insurance market, and wouldn’t leave us with government-run health care.
When it comes to the young and the old, ObamaCare would force an unconventional redistribution of wealth — as its price controls would force insurers to raise rates on younger (generally poorer) Americans relative to older (generally wealthier) ones. This distortion of the market and of nature would likely lead to a host of unpleasant consequences — including, for young adults, the likely consequence of having to forego insurance, getting fined as a result, and having more trouble finding a job.
Four decades of empirical evidence have shown that the costs of government-run health care have risen far more than the costs of privately purchased care, suggesting that American health costs will likely accelerate if ObamaCare goes into effect. Since 1970, Medicare’s costs have risen 34% more, per patient, than the combined costs of all health care in America apart from Medicare and Medicaid. This is true despite very generous treatment of Medicare, such as counting the Medicare prescription drug program as part of privately purchased care, counting health care purchased privately by Medicare beneficiaries (including Medicare copayments and Medigap insurance) among the costs of private care, and not adjusting for significant cost-shifting from Medicare to private entities.
As health care becomes politicized — with basic economic principles being denied — the Obama administration considers coercing states to issue price-controls on health insurers, by threatening to withhold tax revenue to states if they don’t. This would effectively leave private insurers with only two options: ration care, or go out of business.
“Physician Hospitals of America — an organization based in Sioux Falls, S.D.– said the reform law will ‘virtually destroy’ more than 60 hospitals that were under development and leaves few prospects for the future of the industry. ‘Patients across the country should be outraged that, at a time when the government is supposedly attempting to increase access to care, it has chosen to stop the growth of many of the best hospitals in the country,’ said Molly Sandvig, PHA’s executive director.”
The history of federal health-care programs shows that costs have surpassed estimates by tremendous margins. The exception has been the Medicare prescription drug program, which has controlled costs by injecting the sort of private competition and choice that ObamaCare would dramatically diminish.