Though President Obama has repeatedly asserted that he is opposed to instituting British-style, government-run health care in America, his nomination of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under ObamaCare suggests otherwise. Dr. Berwick has continually professed his “love” for a British health-care system that doesn’t remotely offer the high-level quality of care received in the United States.
Consumer-directed health plans have been tremendously successful at controlling otherwise rising health care costs for families and businesses. High-deductible health policies, coupled with health savings accounts, empower patients to choose the best care for the best value, but ObamaCare threatens to take away such plans, because of new regulations to standardize health insurance policies and mandate more expensive, less flexible plans.
From the reality sinking in that there would be a strong financial incentive under ObamaCare for businesses to stop providing health insurance, to the administration’s own estimate that recently drawn-up draft regulations could cause over 100 million Americans to lose their coverage, it is becoming obvious to more and more Americans that ObamaCare is nothing like its Democratic proponents promised it would be.
Increased spending from ObamaCare will destroy up to 700,000 jobs over the next 10 years. This result was found using the methodology of a study by the Center for American Progress, pushed by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, which claimed that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be created “almost immediately” by ObamaCare. The difference in results is because CAP assumed the bill would lower health spending, while this new study is based on the conclusions of both the Congressional Budget Office and Medicare’s chief actuary that the bill will substantially increase national health spending.
When drafting ObamaCare, Congress left the decision of how to manage the transition for current plans to meet the new Washington-approved health care mandates up to the Administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has issued new rules, which will require many firms to drop their current coverage to comply. “Although President Obama and many Democrats promised during the health care reform debate that ‘if you like your health plan, you can keep it,’ the health insurance plans that are now offered by small businesses probably will not survive the transition to a regulated marketplace.
Early retiree insurance costs are significant for many employers, and one of ObamaCare’s selling points was $5 billion in new funds to be given away to companies to cover those costs. But the fund won’t help much and businesses won’t get the benefits they were promised, because the fund is so small it will quickly run out. “Confusion over how the money will be distributed is frustrating employers, consultants and applicants say. ‘They’re already getting nervous,’ said Derek Guyton, a partner and actuary with human resources consultancy Mercer LLC in Chicago. ‘At some point, the money will just run out,’ he insists. Mr. Guyton said midsize employers are questioning whether it’s worth applying for the funding since it requires time-consuming calculations.”
An ill-conceived provision of ObamaCare is already threatening to upend insurance policies for millions of Americans. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners reported to HHS recently that they would not meet a regulatory deadline because of the massive disruption strict adherence to the new law would precipitate. According to some sources, there is potential for millions of people to lose their insurance next year based on rules which are supposed to control premiums by regulating the amount insurers are allowed to spend on administrative costs but actually just drive insurers out of the marketplace altogether.
Democrats officially titled ObamaCare the “Affordable Care Act,” but medical costs for Americans are guaranteed to continue to rise. The weak measures to control costs don’t begin for years, but the new regulations, taxes, and mandates will start much sooner. “What makes Democrats more immediately vulnerable is what’s going to happen to people’s health insurance costs next year. They’re going up. At least that’s the finding of a new report from the consulting group PricewaterhouseCoopers.”
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels expressed his dissatisfaction with ObamaCare during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute — claiming that the health-care overhaul is anything but “reform,” and stating that Indiana is “only just beginning to grapple — reeling might be the term — with what this will mean at the state level.”