Institute a new tax of 10% on the amount paid for indoor tanning services.
When campaigning, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick promised to lower health insurance costs for families. When the tightly regulated Massachusetts insurance market resulted in increased premium costs, he turned to price controls. Insurers successfully appealed to have the Administration’s rate freezes overturned, because they would lead to insurers going out of business. ObamaCare is structured with similar regulations as the Massachusetts health system, and Obama made the same promises about lowering premiums, which are proving impossible to fulfill, so federal price controls might be in our near future.
ObamaCare puts Washington in charge of most of the health care sector. And Washington bureaucrats are planning to micromanage every aspect of it, but Washington will never be able to properly run such a complex system. “The U.S. government’s plan to base Medicare payments to hospitals on certain quality-of-care measures could end up transferring funds away from hospitals in the nation’s poorest, underserved areas, an analysis published Tuesday suggests.”
Among ObamaCare’s supposed selling-points are its insurance regulations which require companies to sell insurance to everyone at the same price, regardless of whether they’re healthy or sick. But if you can buy insurance after you get sick, there’s no reason to pay for it until you need it. Massachusetts instituted these reforms in 2006, and they’ve led to a significant increase in costs, which is exactly what will happen when ObamaCare forces these regulations on the whole country.
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.