Audits and investigations into the effects of ObamaCare from congressional committees, government auditors, advocacy groups, and others.
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.”
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.
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.
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 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.”
“Physician Hospitals of America — an organization based in Sioux Falls, S.D.– said the reform law will ‘virtually destroy’ more than 60 hospitals that were under development and leaves few prospects for the future of the industry. ‘Patients across the country should be outraged that, at a time when the government is supposedly attempting to increase access to care, it has chosen to stop the growth of many of the best hospitals in the country,’ said Molly Sandvig, PHA’s executive director.”
ObamaCare eschews the one proven way to cut health costs — so, while the price of ObamaCare would be higher federal spending, increased deficits, and diminished liberty, what Americans would get in return would be higher health costs and reduced quality of care.
ObamaCare would increase costs, increase deficits, and reduce the quality of health care — and outside of President Obama and other Democrats who are ideologically driven to expand federal power and control, no one wants it.
ObamaCare is a “super-welfare” program that Americans can’t afford and don’t want, it has been advanced through sheer ideological willfulness by President Obama and the Democratic Congress, and it not only calls into question our country’s future finances and medicine but raises crucial questions about the nature of a free society.