Real health-care reform — of the kind that would lower costs, rather than raise them — would require increasing Americans’ control of their own health-care dollars and making prices more transparent, but ObamaCare would merely increase government control and funnel more of Americans’ money to insurers, whether they want it to go there or not.
As a doctor writes, a financial tsunami is on the way for everyone in the path of ObamaCare, and the overhaul’s squeezing of doctors, hospitals, and insurers would likely put America on the path towards a government-controlled health-care system and the decreased quality and availability of care that comes with it.
“Anyone wanting a preview of Obama-Care need just focus on Massachusetts, the state that provided the blueprint for Obama’s plan. It makes a great case for making haste in repealing ObamaCare.”
State-run high-risk pools can provide coverage for the up-to-4-million uninsured Americans with expensive preexisting conditions, and they can do so for $15 to $20 billion a year — compared to ObamaCare’s cost, from 2018 onward, of over $200 billion a year. Furthermore, ObamaCare’s alternative solution of requiring insurers in the regular market to cover people with preexisting conditions at regular premiums, would likely cause a “death spiral”: everyone else’s premiums would rise as a result; many younger and healthier people would respond by dropping their insurance and paying the fine (knowing they could sign back up as necessary); premiums would therefore rise further; more healthy people would drop out; etc. But high-risk pools have to be well-designed, unlike the pools that will start this year under ObamaCare (long before most of the overhaul), which are very poorly designed and will be very poorly funded (receiving less than $2 billion a year, or less than 1 percent of what ObamaCare would soon cost), and hence are doomed — if not designed — to fail.
Proclaiming that “The American people asked Congress and President Obama not to pass the massive healthcare overhaul,” House Minority Leader John Boehner and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor have signed onto two separate discharge petitions aimed at repealing ObamaCare.
In a dramatic move blamed in part on “health-care reform requirements” and described as being “as much a move to address what’s coming as what’s already occurred,” 1,500 hospital workers will be laid off, as a major Pittsburgh hospital closes its emergency department and cuts its beds from 505 to 202 — in what will rank among the largest round of layoffs in the region, in any industry, since the layoffs of Pittsburgh steel workers.