Emergency room visits in Massachusetts have skyrocketed since their health care system was changed in 2006. “[E]xpanded coverage may have contributed to the rise in emergency room visits, as newly insured residents entered the health care system and could not find a primary care doctor or get a last-minute appointment with their physician.” ObamaCare will create similar results nationally, as its massive coverage expansion will exacerbate the existing doctor shortages.
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.
ObamaCare is predicted to result in over 30 million more Americans getting insurance, but what exactly does that mean if they don’t have access to actual medical care? Emergency rooms are expected to be severely overcrowded because of the law, even though they are currently over capacity. “The biggest users of emergency rooms by far are Medicaid recipients. And the new health insurance law will increase their ranks by about 16 million. Medicaid is the state and federal program for low-income families and the disabled. And many family doctors limit the number of Medicaid patients they take because of low government reimbursements.”
ObamaCare is paid for with hundreds of billions in new taxes, and once the budget deceptions are revealed it will force new taxes to pay for it all. “The Democrats’ bill is so massive, so far-reaching, and so poorly designed that its implications for the larger economy (and especially for employment, which should now be Washington’s top priority) could be immense—and disastrous.”
Institute a new tax of 10% on the amount paid for indoor tanning services.