Medicare is an enormous, unfunded liability for the government. Medicare reform was urgently needed before ObamaCare’s passage, and the law was supposed to have addressed those problems. But instead of improving the program, and the country’s fiscal outlook, ObamaCare used the same failed policy changes tried over the last 20 years.
“I think what is interesting is how poorly the law stacks up against its proponents’ own criteria. The new law fails to control rising health-care costs or increasing health-insurance premiums. In fact, the legislation will actually increase U.S. health-care spending by $311 billion over ten years. Insurance premiums will roughly double over the next six years, roughly what was expected before the law passed. It doesn’t restructure programs in a way to improve quality… By 2019, there will still be 21 million uninsured Americans, and nearly half of those who do get coverage under this law are merely thrown into Medicaid. Many other touted reforms come with surprisingly high price tags. For example, sure you can now keep your children on you insurance plan through age 26, but it will cost them an average of $3,380 per year per child in higher premiums. Even if you believed completely in President Obama’s goals, it’s hard to see what there is to like about this law.”
“Is the IRS capable of handling all of its new responsibilities under ObamaCare? Not according to the National Taxpayer Advocate. A new report from the IRS watchdog says that your friendly neighborhood tax collectors are insufficiently prepared to carry out their duties under the new health care law, and will therefore require additional funding not included in the bill.”
ObamaCare is substantially worse than most people think. “The length and complexity of the legislation, combined with a debate that often generated more heat than light, has led to massive confusion about the law’s likely impact. But, it is now possible to analyze what is and is not in it, what it likely will and will not do. In short, the more we learn about what is in this new law, the more it looks like bad news for American taxpayers, businesses, health-care providers, and patients.”
“As events are now unfolding, the Massachusetts plan couldn’t be a more damning indictment of ObamaCare. The state’s universal health-care prototype is growing more dysfunctional by the day, which is the inevitable result of a health system dominated by politics.”
The only medical doctors in the Senate, John Barrasso (R-WY) and Tom Coburn (R-OK,) released “Bad Medicine,” a report on the 100th day of ObamaCare. It highlights the hidden costs and problems with the bill. “One of the most startling assertions in the Coburn/Barrasso report – which was obtained ahead of its release by The Daily Caller – is that nearly 100 million Americans will lose their current form of health insurance and will be required to obtain more expensive plans. One of the president’s most constant refrains in selling his health bill was that if Americans liked what they had, they could keep it.”
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.
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.
The history of federal health-care programs shows that costs have surpassed estimates by tremendous margins. The exception has been the Medicare prescription drug program, which has controlled costs by injecting the sort of private competition and choice that ObamaCare would dramatically diminish.
Robert Samuelson writes that, when it comes to selling ObamaCare, the “disconnect between what Obama says and what he’s doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it.”