“When the health care law passed nearly two years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the temporary insurance pools meant to carry the high-risk uninsured until the coverage expansion kicked in would tear through their $5 billion budget in no time.
That didn’t happen.”
“Undoubtedly, it’s true that some of those individuals did get coverage due to that provision, but HHS claiming credit for Obamacare for all of the increase appears to be an example of the classic statistical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation. Even more importantly, over the long term, the net effect of Obamacare’s many provisions will be to increase the already unaffordable cost of health care, which is one of the main reasons young adults and other uninsured forego coverage.”
“Before ObamaCare’s state-based high risk pool program—the pre-existing condition insurance plan (PCIP)—went into effect, critics (including me) warned that enrollment in the program would run high and that as a result the program would go over budget. In California, at least, it turns out that prediction was half wrong. Enrollment in the program is much lower than expected. But program administrators are now worried it might go over budget anyway.”
“Now that Obama’s CLASS Act has crashed and burned, you may be wondering what ever happened to his much-vaunted high-risk pools. The administration has not been making much of it — a sure sign that it must be failing. And so it is. On October 14 it posted the enrollment data as of August 31, 2011. It turns out that 13 months after the pools went into effect, 33,958 people had enrolled, less than 10% of the 375,000 CMS predicted would be enrolled by the end of 2010.”
“The uninsured truly in need of help are those with household incomes below $25,000. They represent roughly a third of the uninsured, or 16.1 million.
Now, 16 million uninsured is nothing to sneeze at. But they represent only 5% of the American population. Finding coverage for them doesn’t require remaking one-sixth of the U.S. economy, as ObamaCare does. Many of these 16 million people are already eligible for public insurance, chiefly Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. They just haven’t signed up.”
‘There is no hard evidence of a link, but it is perfectly reasonable to assume that this demographic increased their health insurance coverage, while all other demographics saw their coverage rates fall, thanks to the Obamacare provision that forces insurance companies to allow parents to add their adult children to their employer-provided health plan.
But, while these mostly unemployed but newly insured young adults are benefiting from increased health care, that increased care comes at a cost. Health insurance is never free…
A big reason why health spending continues to grow is because more and more Americans have health insurance. Contrary to what advocates of Obamacare claimed, expanded health insurance coverage increases, it doesn’t decrease, health care spending.”
“The report Doyle ordered before leaving office certainly reveals something about how the law will affect hundreds of thousands of individuals in the state he used to govern, it’s not all flattering. Indeed, it’s telling that despite bring ordered and authored by true-blue ObamaCare backers, a big part of what this report suggests is that the law will ultimately raise the health insurance costs for large numbers of the state’s residents.”
“The percentage of American adults who lack health insurance coverage has not only increased during the presidency of Barack Obama, but it has continued to increase since Obama signed his signature piece of legislation last year mandating that by 2014 every American carry health insurance, according to a Gallup survey released today.”
“That law’s supposed beneficiaries are the uninsured. Yet 61 percent of them think the law will either not help them or will hurt them (see pie chart below). The main takeaway: Congress can repeal ObamaCare and its supposed beneficiaries won’t even care.”
“If anything, these numbers are low. A McKinsey survey of employers released in June found that nearly a third of employers are likely to drop their coverage thanks to ObamaCare. The Urban Institute suggested last year that, in the wake of the health care overhaul, ‘droves of employees—potentially tens of millions—are likely to shift out of employer-provided insurance.’ Former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin found substantial incentives for employers to drop coverage, and estimated that as many as 35 million individuals could end up getting their health insurance from the government-run exchanges created by the health care overhaul. “