ObamaCare’s Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act — with its design that invites adverse selection by precluding the ability to adjust premiums for health risk — is yet another entitlement program that is destined to add to the federal government’s unfunded obligations.
After much discussion about the need to bend the cost curve down, and Democratic assurances that ObamaCare would do just that, a report by the Medicare Chief Actuary has predicted that costs will in fact rise – estimating that the health care overhaul will actually increase health care spending by $311 billion over the next decade.
As part of its long-running campaign to sell America on ObamaCare, the administration has now added a Medicare mailer, sent directly to America’s seniors, which makes some rather debatable claims about the recently passed health care overhaul.
Claiming that Virginia has standing to sue by virtue of a law passed by the state’s General Assembly, making it illegal to require citizens of the commonwealth to buy health insurance, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has asked a federal judge to deny the Obama administration’s request to have Virginia’s case challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare be dismissed.
A former CBO Director says that ObamaCare would likely raise deficits by $600,000,000,000 more than the CBO projects, could result in 40 million more Americans being shifted from employer-provided to government-provided insurance than the CBO projects, and would impose such high effective marginal tax-rates on those who are shifted onto government-provided insurance that it would be very hard for them to pursue the American Dream of making a better life.
As a so-called improvement to the insurance market, ObamaCare outlaws many inexpensive, more affordable types of insurance to force people into Washington-approved, comprehensive plans that are more expensive which “could strip more than 1 million people of their insurance coverage, violating a key goal of President Barack Obama’s reforms.”
“Even Bill Clinton’s economic advisers warned during the HillaryCare debates that imposing price controls would be difficult to implement and were likely to produce adverse effects. But those lessons appear not to have been passed on to the current administration, which seems determined to turn health insurance into an all-but government-run quasi-public utility.”
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.