Why Obamacare failed - Chicago Tribune

Why Obamacare failed - Chicago Tribune

Come November, the grim trudge across the increasingly barren Obamacare landscape begins anew. Illinois consumers likely face staggering price hikes for individual insurance policies. Some types of plans could cost an average of 43 percent to 55 percent more. Ditto across the country: A first tranche of states approved 2017 rates with similarly cardiac-arrest-inducing premium increases.

Many Illinois consumers will find fewer choices because major carriers fled this market. UnitedHealthcare bolted. So did Aetna. Land of Lincoln Health collapsed mid-year, leaving policy holders to scramble for coverage that could cost them plenty. In many places across Illinois and the nation, people will find drastically fewer choices of plans than they did last year.

Those insurers fled because they didn't want to lose more money on a government-run market that is so far out of whack — a market they think likely will never be profitable for them. That isn't surprising, as we enumerate below.

But by diagnosing Obamacare, all of us can see the mistakes that any repair or replacement can avoid. So let's look at the failings and how they can drive solutions:

Obamacare failed because it flunked Economics 101 and Human Nature 101. It straitjacketed insurers into providing overly expensive, soup-to-nuts policies. It wasn't flexible enough so that people could buy as much coverage as they wanted and could afford — not what the government dictated. Many healthy people primarily want catastrophic coverage. Obamacare couldn't lure them in, couldn't persuade them to buy on the chance they'd get sick.

Obamacare failed because the penalties for going uncovered are too low when stacked against its skyrocketing premium costs. Next year, the penalty for staying uninsured is $695 per adult, or perhaps 2.5 percent of a family's taxable household income. That's far less than many Americans would pay for coverage. Financial incentive: Skip Obamacare.

Obamacare failed because insurance is based on risk pools — that is, the lucky subsidize the unlucky. The unlucky who have big health problems (and big medical bills) reap much greater benefits than those who remain healthy and out of the doctors' office. But Obamacare's rules hamstring insurers. They can't exclude people for pre-existing conditions, and can't charge older customers more than three times as much as the young. Those are good goals, but they skew the market in ways Obamacare didn't figure out how to offset. Result: Young and healthy consumers pay far more in premiums than their claims (probably) would justify in order to subsidize the unexpectedly large influx of older, sicker customers who require expensive care. Too many unlucky people, too few lucky people: That will collapse any insurance scheme.

Obamacare failed because it allowed Americans to sign up after they got sick and needed help paying all those medical bills. Insurance should be structured so that, although you don't know if you'll need it, you pay for it anyway, just in case; your alternative is financial doom. But if you can game the system and, for example, buy auto coverage after you crash into your garage, then you have no incentive to buy insurance beforehand.

Obamacare failed because it hasn't tamed U.S. medical costs. Health care is about supply and demand: People who get coverage use it, especially if the law mandates free preventive care. Iron law of economics: Nothing is free; someone pays. To pretend otherwise was folly. Those forces combined to spike the costs of care, and thus insurance costs.

Obamacare failed because too many carriers simply can't cover expenses, let alone turn a profit, in this rigidly controlled system. Take Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, the state's dominant Obamacare insurer. Last year, for every dollar the carrier collected, it spent $1.32 buying care and providing services for customers, according to BCBS President Maurice Smith. No wonder BCBS is proposing rate increases from 23 percent to 45 percent for its individual plans.

A question looms: Is Obamacare plunging in a so-called insurance death spiral? Is the market so unstable that plans are doomed to get more and more expensive, driving more Americans and more insurers out of the market until ... Obamacare thuds to the pavement?

We won't predict that, but neither do we see a mathematical alternative. What's clear is that the solutions to Obamacare are implicit in its failures. A repaired or replaced system has to be more flexible, letting insurers offer a wider range of plans so that consumers, not lawmakers or bureaucrats, dictate what's best for them. That system should protect those who carry continuous coverage, not coddle those who duck in and out of plans when their health needs change.

A new system also should scrap the job-killing Obamacare mandates that discourage companies from hiring and discourage workers from adding hours. Instead of gearing subsidies to incomes, let Americans not covered via an employer reap tax credits to help finance their insurance purchases on the open market. And tell us again: Why can't insurers sell policies across state lines? Imagine the pricing competition that would unleash.

We can deny the current system's failings, or we can parlay our evolving knowledge into something much better.

Put another way: The next president and Congress either reckon with Obamacare's failures or ... wait for the thud.

“What would you do? Just let people die?” | Foundation for Economic Education

“What would you do? Just let people die?” | Foundation for Economic Education

"Well then, what would you do? Just let people die?”

Those words were thrown at me the first time I debated a national healthcare program for America, way back in the 1990s. Through all the years since then, I have been hearing some version of them at regular intervals.

During the debate over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), that question was the ultimate resort of anyone arguing in favor of the law: whatever its problems, it was better than letting tens of thousands of Americans die each year.

There are a couple of shaky assumptions underlying the question. The first is that health insurance does a great deal to increase health and reduce mortality. This seems obvious enough, but it’s surprisingly hard to tease out of the data.

For example, the creation of Medicare, which vastly expanded utilization of health care, seems to have produced no measurable impact on mortality among the elderly in its first 10 years of existence. There is ample evidence that health insurance protects people from financial risk — which isn’t surprising, because that’s what insurance is for. The evidence that it protects people from premature death is less compelling.

Of course, the financial risk is a real problem — a health-related financial disaster can be devastating for families that go through it. But even if we also assume that there are real, and large, health benefits from providing insurance to people, that still wouldn’t mean that the ACA was better than nothing. This is the fallacious syllogism that led America into the Iraq War:

1. Something must be done.

2. This is something.

3. Therefore, this must be done.

And thus we got a bloated, complicated law that still isn’t quite working as planned. Fewer people are insured than projected, the insurance is less generous than be expected, the exchanges are in financial trouble, the federal back end to pay insurers still hasn’t been built.

Worst of all, we’ve locked in most of the features that people hated about the old system: the lack of transparency, the endless battles with insurers over what is covered and what isn’t, the feeling that you are captive to behemoth government and corporate bureaucracies that are more interested in the numbers on their spreadsheets than in what you want out of your health care.

I do think that something should have been done. But not this something. What we should have done is created a system that focused on protecting people from the risk we know they face — catastrophic medical bills — and that sought to preserve the best of the American system rather than the worst — that is, to preserve our endless talent for innovation through markets rather than our decidedly lesser talent for creating and managing massive regulatory bureaucracies.

Government as the Insurer of Last Resort

How could a government program have freed up markets to innovate? Simple: by getting the government to do something it already does decently well, which is to function as the insurer of last resort. Deposit insurance, pioneered by the United States, has basically halted bank runs. Pension benefit guarantees have made sure seniors don’t end up in penury. (The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation could be better financed, but that doesn’t mean the idea itself is bad.) FEMA essentially functions as an insurer of last resort for people struck by natural disasters.

These programs introduce a certain amount of moral hazard, as people take more risks and underinsure themselves in the expectation that the government will pick up the tab. But when you look at the devastation these programs have mitigated, it is hard to call them anything but an overwhelming success.

How would a similar program work for health care? The government would pick up 100 percent of the tab for health care over a certain percentage of adjusted gross income — the number would have to be negotiated through the political process, but I have suggested between 15 and 20 percent.

There could be special treatment for people living at or near the poverty line, and for people who have medical bills that exceed the set percentage of their income for five years in a row, so that the poor and people with chronic illness are not disadvantaged by the system.

In exchange, we would get rid of the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health insurance, and all the other government health insurance programs, with the exception of the military’s system, which for obvious reasons does need to be run by the government.

People would be free to insure the gap if they wanted, and such insurance would be relatively cheap, because the insurers would see their losses strictly limited. Or people could choose to save money in a tax-deductible health savings account to cover the eventual likelihood of a serious medical problem.

Advantages of the Insurer-of-Last-Resort Alternative

Of course, anyone proposing an alternative to the ACA, or to the previous status quo, has to be able to say why the alternative is better. In this case, there are three answers to that challenge. First of all, it is dead simple, and the simpler a government program is, the better it works. The ideal government program can be explained to a third grader on a postcard, and this one comes close.

The second reason this is better is that it protects people from actual catastrophic costs better than the existing system, while also being more progressive. Warren Buffett will get nothing out of the system; someone with very little income will have all medical bills paid. No one will have to worry about being slapped with an unpayable bill if, say, an anesthesiologist turns out to be out of network.

But the third and most important reason this alternative is better is that it introduces a key element that has gone missing from health care since third-party payers started to take responsibility for the bills: transparent prices, and consumers who make decisions based on them.

Milton Friedman famously divided spending into four categories, which P. J. O’Rourke summarized thus:

1. You spend your money on yourself. You’re motivated to get the thing you want most at the best price. This is the way middle-aged men haggle with Porsche dealers.

2. You spend your money on other people. You still want a bargain, but you’re less interested in pleasing the recipient of your largesse. This is why children get underwear at Christmas.

3. You spend other people’s money on yourself. You get what you want but price no longer matters. The second wives who ride around with the middle-aged men in the Porsches do this kind of spending at Neiman Marcus.

4. You spend other people’s money on other people. And in this case, who gives a [damn]?

The first category is what produces market efficiency. Unfortunately, almost no one in the system does that. Instead, we have insurers spending their money on someone else, consumers spending someone else’s money on themselves, and the government spending other people’s money on someone else. No one gets what he or she wants, vast oceans of times are wasted fighting over what to buy, and it all costs too much.

Of course, some things are too expensive to get price discipline from this system: organ transplants, very early preemies, many forms of cancer. But there’s little price discipline in those areas now, so we wouldn’t be any worse off. Meanwhile, lots of areas, from hospital beds to the details of knee surgery, would for the first time in decades be subject to the decisions of consumers who care both about getting what they need and about how much they’re spending.

Conclusion

I spent years uninsured in my twenties, and remarkably, I got the best health care of my life, because doctors stopped performing tests and procedures “just in case” and thought hard about what was necessary. I was obviously taking an enormous financial risk, and the government can usefully mitigate that. But I was also an empowered consumer rather than a number in our vast healthcare bureaucracy. A better future for American health care would be one where more people are uninsured and fewer of them are at risk.

15 Stats That Destroy Liberal Narratives - John Hawkins - Page full

15 Stats That Destroy Liberal Narratives - John Hawkins - Page full

1) “Muslims account for only about 1 percent of the U.S. population but account for about half of terrorist attacks since 9/11. That means Muslims in the United States are about 5,000 percent more likely to commit terrorist attacks than non-Muslims.” -- Mark Krikorian

2) “Consider, for example, that in 1958 a mere 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 2013, that number had grown to 87 percent. In 2012 these once-taboo unions hit an all-time high.
Ku Klux Klan membership has shrunk drastically from millions a century ago to fewer than 5,000 today. The Black Panthers are essentially extinct. While plenty of other hate groups have attempted to fill the void, they have always operated on the margins of society. Black politicians are now common—President Obama’s percentage of the white vote was almost perfectly in line with that received by other recent Democrats, all of whom were white.
Granted, these statistics offer but a snapshot of American society, but the more one looks, the more a trend emerges. America is a lot of things; racist isn’t one of them.”  -- Greg Jones

3) “The harsh reality awaiting these low-income Americans is undeniable: according to 2013 data from a 2014 Merritt Hawkins study, 55% of doctors already refuse new Medicaid patients. According to the HSC Health Tracking Physician Survey, 2008, the percentage of doctors that refuse new Medicaid patients dwarf by about 8 to 10 times the percentage that refuses new private insurance patients.
Such ‘insurance’ from Obamacare not only fails to provide access to doctors, but research in the top medical journals such as Cancer, American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation and Annals of Surgery, show that Medicaid beneficiaries suffer worse outcomes than similar patients with private insurance ... all at an added cost of another $800 billion by CBO estimates to taxpayers after the decade.
It is not hyperbole to call Medicaid a disgrace at its annual cost of about $450 billion, and expanding it rather than helping poor people buy private insurance is simply inexplicable.” -- Scott Atlas

4 ) “In other words, all of the disruption, spending, taxation, and premium hikes in Obamacare has only reduced the percentage of U.S. residents without health insurance by 2.7 percentage points, from 13.9% to 11.1%: a remarkably small reduction, and far lower than what the law was supposed to achieve.” -- Avik Roy

5) “Bernie Sanders thinks you can pay for an 18 trillion dollar expansion of the welfare state — to make it align with a Denmark that doesn’t actually exist — simply by taxing ‘the billionaire class.’ There are 536 billionaires in America. Even if you confiscated everything they had — which, by the way, would surely destroy the American economy by triggering the greatest round of capital flight in human history and amount to government seizure of countless businesses — it wouldn’t come close to covering the tab of Sanders’s proposals.” -- Jonah Goldberg

6) “In 2010, 38,329 people died from drug overdoses, twice the number a decade earlier. More people died of drug overdoses than from automobile accidents (30,196), murders (13,000) or gun accidents (700).” -- Ann Coulter

7) “Between 1979 and 2010, for instance, the average after-tax income for the poorest quintile of American households rose from $14,800 to $19,200; for the second-poorest quintile, it rose from $29,900 to $39,100. Meanwhile, per-person antipoverty spending at the state and federal level increased sixfold between 1968 and 2008 — and that’s excluding Medicare, unemployment benefits and Social Security.” -- Ross Douthat

8) “Just last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee received a report that in just four years, 121 illegal aliens who had been released by ICE went on to murder Americans.” -- Mark Krikorian

9) “Officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the food-stamp program has become the country’s fastest-growing means-tested social-welfare program. Only Medicaid is more expensive. Between 2000 and 2013, SNAP caseloads grew to 47.6 million from 17.2 million, and spending grew to $80 billion from $20.6 billion, according to the Agriculture Department. SNAP participation fell slightly last year, to 46.5 million individuals, as the economy improved, but that still leaves a population the size of Spain’s living in the U.S. on food stamps.” -- Jason Riley

10) “Pace Mr. Obama, the state-prison population (which accounts for 87% of the nation’s prisoners) is dominated by violent criminals and serial thieves. In 2013 drug offenders made up less than 16% of the state-prison population; violent felons were 54% and property offenders 19%. Reducing drug-related admissions to 15 large state penitentiaries by half would lower those states’ prison count by only 7%, according to the Urban Institute.

In federal prisons—which hold only 13% of the nation’s prisoners—drug offenders make up half of the inmate population. But these offenders aren’t casual drug users; overwhelmingly, they are serious traffickers. Fewer than 1% of drug offenders sentenced in federal court in 2014 were convicted of simple drug possession, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Most of those possession convictions were plea-bargained down from trafficking charges.” -- Heather Mac Donald

11) “The conservative Heritage Foundation estimated unlawful immigrant households paid $39.2 billion in 2010, but received $93.7 billion in government services.” -- Oliver Darcy

12) “On Wednesday, a Washington Post article announced that ‘The San Bernardino shooting is the second mass shooting today and the 355th this year.’ Vox, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, this newspaper and others reported similar statistics. Grim details from the church in Charleston, a college classroom in Oregon and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado are still fresh, but you could be forgiven for wondering how you missed more than 300 other such attacks in 2015. At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth, open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four ‘mass shootings’ this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.” -- Mark Follman

13) “As Pew Research cheerfully reports, previous immigrants were ‘almost entirely’ European. But since Kennedy's immigration act, a majority of immigrants have been from Latin America. One-quarter are from Asia. Only 12 percent of post-1965-act immigrants have been from Europe -- and they're probably Muslims.
Apparently, the ‘American experiment’ is actually some kind of sociological trial in which we see if people who have no history of Western government can run a constitutional republic.
As of 1970, there were only 9 million Hispanics in the entire country, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, there are well more than 60 million.” -- Ann Coulter 

14) “No fewer than eight major studies from around the world have found homosexuality is not a genetic condition.
Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council says that these numerous, rigorous studies of identical twins have now made it impossible to argue that there is a ‘gay gene.’ If homosexuality were inborn and predetermined, then when one identical twin is homosexual, the other should be, as well.
Yet one study from Yale and Columbia Universities found homosexuality common to only 6.7 percent of male identical twins and 5.3 percent of female identical twins.
The low rate of common homosexuality in identical twins – around six percent – is easily explained by nurture, not nature.
Researchers Peter Bearman and Hannah Brueckner concluded that environment was the determining factor. They rejected outright that ‘genetic influence independent of social context’ as the reason for homosexuality. ‘(O)ur results support the hypothesis that less gendered socialization in early childhood and preadolescence shapes subsequent same-sex romantic preferences.’
‘Less gendered socialization’ means, a boy was without a positive father figure, or a girl was without a positive mother figure.
In light of the evidence, Sprigg said simply, ‘No one is born gay.’” -- Mark Hodges

15) “Over the last year, only 1.3 million Americans of working age have entered the workforce, even as the population of this same demographic increased by more than 2.8 million. Just over 1 million members of this group found jobs. That's right -- of the new additions to the working age population, less than four in 10 found jobs.
The newspapers touted the reduction in the unemployment rate to 5.3 percent as a cause for celebration. Yet for every three Americans added to the working age population (16 and older), only around one new job (1.07) has been created under Obama. At this pace, America will soon officially have a zero unemployment rate. But that will only be because no one will be looking for work.” -- Stephen Moore

9 Obamacare Predictions That Have Come True

9 Obamacare Predictions That Have Come True

Four years ago, many health policy analysts, including those at The Heritage Foundation, predicted some of the effects this law would have on Americans. These are all coming true.Here are nine of our predictions that have come to pass—and it’s not over yet.
1. The individual mandate is an enforcement nightmare.As a candidate, President Obama worried that an individual mandate to buy insurance would be unenforceable. He changed his mind once he became president. This year—the first year that the mandate penalties are to be imposed—he has already started backtracking on the enforcement of the provision he signed into law.
2. The law will create new disincentives to work.Between Obamacare’s higher taxes and its subsidies that drop off if you raise your income, there’s not a lot of incentive here to work harder and better your situation.
3. The law, particularly the employer mandate, will impose new costs on businesses that undercut jobs and wages.The employer mandate has been delayed until 2015, but the uncertainty Obamacare has created—and its 18 new tax hikes—have put a huge dent in job creation.
4. The law undermines competition and further consolidates health insurance markets.Heritage Foundation analysis of federal and state exchanges shows that the law has, in general, reduced competition and consolidated health insurance markets. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of insurers offering coverage on the individual markets in all 50 states has declined nationwide by 29 percent.
5. The law guarantees major premium increases.As Heritage predicted, the average annual premiums for single and family coverage in 2014 are rising in the state and federal health insurance exchanges all around the country. In 11 states, premiums for 27-year-olds have more than doubled since 2013; in 13 states, premiums for 50-year-olds have increased more than 50 percent.
>>> Get more details on all of these Obamacare effects6. The law discourages insurance enrollment among the young.The law’s insurance rules and new benefit mandates will make it cheaper for many younger Americans simply to remain uninsured and pay the penalty fine. It’s not surprising that young people have been staying away.
7. The law’s Medicare savings would not financially strengthen Medicare.The law’s proponents originally promised that “savings” from Medicare changes would be spent simultaneously in two places: helping Medicare and expanding Obamacare. But money can be spent only once, so that didn’t work.
8. The law’s Medicare changes will result in reduced benefits and threaten seniors’ access to care.The law’s impact is fairly straightforward: Fewer Medicare providers, reimbursed at rates progressively reduced over time, will create access problems for patients. Medicare cuts have been underway for several years now.
9. The law compels taxpayers to fund abortion and weakens protections of the right of conscience.Obamacare mandates health plans that include coverage of abortion. It also spawned the Health and Human Services regulatory mandate that forces American employers to provide coverage for abortion-inducing drugs. It is safe to say that four years ago, millions of Americans did not expect that the national health care law would become a vehicle for an aggressive government infringement of personal liberty or coerce Americans to fund medical procedures and drugs in direct violation of their ethical and religious convictions.

Per Bylund: What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Per Bylund: What Sweden Can Teach Us About ObamaCare - WSJ.com

Other stories include people waiting many hours before a nurse or anyone talked to them after they arrived in emergency rooms and then suffering for long periods of time before receiving needed care. A 42-year-old woman in Karlstad seeking care for meningitis died in the ER after a three-hour wait. A woman with colon cancer spent 12 years contesting a money-saving decision to deny an abdominal scan that would have found the cancer earlier. The denial-of-care decision was not made by an insurance company, but by the government health-care system and its policies.
This is why Swedes over the past two decades have been rushing to purchase medical coverage through private insurance, which guarantees and delivers timely and qualitative care. Insurance Sweden, the country's national insurance company trade organization, reports that in 2013 12% of working adults had private insurance even though they are already "guaranteed" public health care. The number of private policyholders has increased by 67% over the last five years, despite the fact that an average Swedish family already pays nearly $20,000 annually in taxes toward health care and elderly care, including what Americans call Medicare.

Sweden has started to self-correct, choosing a more sustainable path: private health-care options that allow for competition, customer choice and better overall care for Swedes. America should learn from Sweden's experience and follow the Nordic country's recent example, turning away from government-controlled health care to embrace a free-market solution.
It is possible to have truly affordable, qualitative and accessible care. But the only way to get this result is through a system where providers freely compete with each other to lower costs and raise quality. There is no short cut to well-functioning, affordable health care. Sweden's undesirable experience shows this very clearly.

PJ Media » Obamacare Number Games: How Many Enrollees, Really?

PJ Media » Obamacare Number Games: How Many Enrollees, Really?

Avik Roy — one of the few journalists who has actually been examining the data and drawing his own conclusions rather than regurgitating or looking to justify each of the administration’s assertions — estimates that the actual number of newly covered young people is less than one-third of the number claimed, and perhaps far less.
In fact, the percentage of uninsured Americans aged 18 to 24 has not changed at all from 2008 — prior to the economic collapse — through 2013. And of course, the change in policy did not come free. Roy estimates that family plans now cost $160 to $480 a year more due to the new coverage — and that is for all families, including all those without children who are newly covered.

Are We About To Face A Severe Doctor Shortage?

Are We About To Face A Severe Doctor Shortage?

Two features of ObamaCare will substantially increase the demand, while (surprisingly) nothing in the law increases supply. And when people take steps to increase their access in response to growing waiting times, the success of some will increase the rationing problems for everyone else.

At this point we have no idea how many people will become newly insured under ObamaCare. For the first year out, the number of people with insurance may actually go down! But the administration's goal is to insure an additional 30 million people and eventually a lot of those people will acquire health plans. When they do, the economic studies predict that they will try to double their use of the health care system.

Adding to this increased demand will be new mandated benefits. The administration never seems to tire of reminding seniors that they are entitled to a free annual checkup. Then there are new benefits for women, including free contraceptives. And all of us will be entitled to a long list of preventive services — with no deductible or copayment.

But the health care system can't possibly deliver on all these promises. The original ObamaCare bill actually had a line item for increased doctor training. But this provision was zeroed out before passage, probably to keep down the cost of health reform. The result will be increased rationing by waiting.

Take preventive care. The health reform law says that health insurance must cover the tests and procedures recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. What would that involve? In the American Journal of Public Health, scholars at Duke University calculated that arranging for and counseling patients about all those screenings would require 1,773 hours of the average primary care physician's time each year, or 7.4 hours per working day.

And all of this time is time spent searching for problems and talking about the search. If the screenings turn up a real problem, there will have to be more testing and more counseling. Bottom line: To meet the promise of free preventive care nationwide, every family doctor in America would have to work full-time delivering it, leaving no time for all the other things they need to do.

When demand exceeds supply in a normal market, the price rises until it reaches a market-clearing level. But in this country, as in other developed nations, Americans do not primarily pay for care with their own money. They pay with time.

How long does it take you on the phone to make an appointment to see a doctor? How many days do you have to wait before she can see you? How long does it take to get to the doctor's office? Once there, how long do you have to wait before being seen? These are all non-price barriers to care, and there is substantial evidence that they are more important in deterring care than the fee the doctor charges, even for low-income patients.

For example, the average wait to see a new family doctor in this country is just under three weeks. But in Boston, with ObamaCare-type reform, the wait is about two months.

When people cannot find a primary care physician who will see them in a reasonable length of time, all too often they go to hospital emergency rooms. Yet one study found up to 20% of the patients who enter an emergency room leave without ever seeing a doctor, because they get tired of waiting. Be prepared for that situation to get worse.

The disaster that is Obamacare (ongoing)

The disaster that is Obamacare (ongoing)

• It's Dec. 3 and the Obamacare web site is still broken for many people. CNN found that users still get error screens mid-stream. Others have found try-again-later messages. Worst of all, even if you do get through enrollment, you may still not actually be enrolled with any insurer.
• Cost of that broken web site? Estimated at $1 billion and counting. (Similar-size projects done by private companies *for their own core business* cost maybe $50 million.)
• Even Obama-loving, Democrat business owners are sour on Obamacare…after having taken away their employees' coverage, on the grounds that Obamacare with its new plan mandates is just too costly for them as employers, but somehow not too costly for their employees.
• Even President Obama's former press secretary, Robert Gibbs, thinks the Obama administration needs to become more honest. (Ouch!) Sadly, Sebelius didn't get the memo.
• Things look so bad for Democrats politically that even Obama's rubber-stamp, Sen. Al Franken, may be in trouble in 2014.
• Government-run health care doesn't work in the UK either, where more than 1000 NHS patients have died of simple dehydration since 2003. (Hmm…an unofficial way they get rid of pesky, money-draining patients?)

No, Melissa Harris-Perry, “Obamacare” was not conceived by rich white men

http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/12/no-melissa-harris-perry-obamacare-was-not-conceived-by-rich-white-men/

Jeanne Schulte Scott argued for the trade journal Healthcare Financial Management in March 2007 that then-President Bush had "put all his eggs into his 'privatization' basket" in his 2007 State of the Union address; nevertheless, he made health care the "issue du jour" for the 2008 presidential race. "Health care is hot!" she wrote, and then made a prediction that seems so quaint given all that's passed in the last four-and-a-half years:

The many would-be candidates for president in 2008 are falling over themselves offering their own proposals. We will soon see a "Giuliani-care" and "Obama-care" to go along with "McCain-care," "Edwards-care," and a totally revamped and remodeled "Hillary-care" from the 1990s.

The term took off from there, The Atlantic continued:

Headline writers squeezed for space gave the term momentum since "Obamacare" is so much shorter than "Obama's health care overhaul" or "Obama's health care bill." On May 30, 2007, The Hotline headlined a roundup of news about then-candidate Obama announcing his health care proposal "Obama: Here's Obamacare." A few days later, Jason Horowitz's story for the June 6 New York Observer (which also post dates its issues) was titled, "Stat! Clinton Readies Scalpel for Obamacare." Neither contains the term in the body of the story, so it was likely the work of an editor.

Timothy Noah wrote a series for Slate about "the health care primary," beginning June 19 with "Obamacare: Better Than It Looks." Stories on "Edwardscare: A Trojan Horse," "Hillarycare II: New and Improved," and "McCaincare: Provocative but Vague" followed.

Mitt Romney began using the term later in 2007, as a contrast to "Romneycare," clearly focused on policy differences, not race,  'Obamacare': The word that defined the health care debate:

It first appeared on the campaign trail in May of that year, when Romney distinguished his effort on health reforms as governor of Massachusetts.

"In my state, I worked on health care for some time. We had half a million people without insurance, and I said, 'How can we get those people insured without raising taxes and without having government take over heath care,'" he said in Des Moines, Iowa, advocating for states to find free market solutions.

"And let me tell you, if we don't do it, the Democrats will. If the Democrats do it, it will be socialized medicine; it'll be government-managed care. It'll be what's known as Hillarycare or Barack Obamacare, or whatever you want to call it."

On the campaign trail since, he has defended himself from charges of similarities between "Romneycare" and "Obamacare" — including a critique from a rival presidential candidate that the two amount to "Obamneycare."

Mark Halperin: Obamacare Contains "Death Panels" | Video | RealClearPolitics

Link: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/11/25/mark_halperin_obamacare_contains_death_panels.html#.UpPVCOdeqp4.twitter

NEWSMAX: The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for "death panels," which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won't, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

"It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled," Halperin told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

MALZBERG, HOST: A lot of people said you weren't going to be able to keep your health care, but also they focused on the death panels, which will be coming, call them what you will, rationing, is part of it...

HALPERIN: No, I agree, and that's going to be a huge issue, and that's something else on which the president was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.

MALZBERG: So, you believe there will be rationing, a.k.a. death panels?

HALPERIN: It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled.

Just how many Americans will really have their health insurance affected by Obamacare? | AEIdeas

Link: http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/11/just-how-many-americans-will-really-have-their-health-insurance-affected-by-obamacare/

So what do the numbers look like? Based on the administration's own estimates from 2010, Veuger projects that tens of millions of people with employer-based insurance policies will be 'affected' by Obamacare, their plans either modified or cancelled. A far cry from Professor's Gruber's claim that only 9 million Americans, "three per cent of the population, will have to buy a new product that complies with the A.C.A.'s more stringent requirements for individual plans."

Articles: Forcing Mom into Medicaid was Part of the Plan

Link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/forcing_mom_into_medicaid_was_part_of_the_plan.html (via shareaholic.com)

Massachusetts: An Apples to Oranges Comparison | National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/critical-condition/339511/massachusetts-apples-oranges-comparison-grace-marie-turner

Marc Thiessen: Obama’s 16 words - The Washington Post

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-obamas-16-words/2013/10/31/17b955ae-4227-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Well, now it seems President Obama has his own 16 words to answer for: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan." (Actually, it was a little more than 16 words if you include what the president said next: "Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.")
Obama attempted to move the goal posts in his speech in Boston's Faneuil Hall Wednesday, declaring that if you like your current health plan, "For the vast majority . . . you can keep it." Sorry, he didn't say "the vast majority" back in 2009. He said you can keep your plan. Period. No matter what.
Indeed, Obama repeated this promise on at least 24 separate occasions — before and after the law went into effect. It was critical to his case. Without his 16-word pledge that no one would lose his or her health plans, Obamacare might never have become law.
But Obama's 16 words were untrue. Across the country, Americans are now seeing their health plans discontinued — and experts say the cancellations could eventually reach 16 million. As one woman in California who got a cancellation letter from her insurer told the Los Angeles Times, "All we've been hearing the last three years is if you like your policy you can keep it . . . I'm infuriated because I was lied to."
Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the administration not only knew but fully intended for all these people to lose their existing plans. The Health and Human Services Department specifically wrote regulations to ensure that they would — narrowing a provision in the law "grandfathering" in existing plans so that "40 to 67 percent" of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their policies. That's because moving millions of customers out of the individual and small group markets and into the exchanges is critical to making the scheme financially viable. Indeed, the survival of Obamacare depends on it.

It was Obama's objective from the start to destroy the market in order to fund Obamacare. He wants these people to lose coverage so they have no choice but to sign up for the exchanges. Obama all but admitted this in his Boston speech. "If you're getting one of these [cancellation] letters, just shop around in the new marketplace," he declared. In other words, don't worry if the plan you're happy with is being cancelled, just join Obamacare! That was the plan all along.

No Such Thing As Free Health Benefits - Reason.com

Link: http://reason.com/archives/2013/11/13/no-such-thing-as-free-health-benefits

Here's an idea: If you don't want people to feel that you've betrayed them, don't betray them. Don't promise, dozens of times without qualification, that they will be able to keep their health plans if they like them when you know that is not true.

Here's another suggestion: When you are apologizing for misleading people, don't seek to minimize the significance of your deception. "We're talking about 5 percent of the population," Obama told NBC's Chuck Todd. "It only affects a small amount of the population."

Obama was referring to the 14 million Americans who obtain health insurance through individually purchased policies, which is hardly a small number. According to studies by the Manhattan Institute and the Heritage Foundation, the policies these people find in Obamacare's insurance exchanges typically will cost more than what they have now.

Obamacare is junk insurance | WashingtonExaminer.com

Link: http://washingtonexaminer.com/obamacare-is-junk-insurance/article/2538366 (via shareaholic.com)

When Obama claims your old plan was "junk," he's not leveling with you. Your health plan wasn't canceled out of some kind of concern that you are insufficiently insured. Rather, you simply must pay more – and get less – to make Obamacare's finances work.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/11/04/49-state-analysis-obamacare-to-increase-individual-market-premiums-by-avg-of-41-subsidies-flow-to-elderly/

In the average state, Obamacare will increase underlying premiums by 41 percent. As we have long expected, the steepest hikes will be imposed on the healthy, the young, and the male. And Obamacare's taxpayer-funded subsidies will primarily benefit those nearing retirement—people who, unlike the young, have had their whole lives to save for their health-care needs.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/lies-of-obamacare-documented.php

Over the last day or two, the major breaking story has really been a throwback: in 2010, the Obama administration promulgated rules governing what plans that pre-existed Obamacare would be "grandfathered" under that statute, and allowed to continue. In the context of announcing its rules, the administration predicted that because of their restrictiveness, many millions of Americans would lose their existing insurance coverage, whether they liked it or not.

Obama Isn’t the Only One Who Lied | Power Line

Link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/obama-isnt-the-only-one-who-lied.php

The Obama administration has run aground on the president's promise that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it: Scott Rasmussen finds that 55% of voters rate Obama's performance on health care as "poor." But, as Byron York notes, at least 27 Democratic senators made the same false promise to their constituents:

The list includes the entire Democratic leadership in the Senate as well as Democrats facing tough re-election races in 2014, like Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, and Kay Hagan.

To pass health plan, Obama and Dems kept mum about its downsides | WashingtonExaminer.com

Link: http://washingtonexaminer.com/to-pass-health-plan-obama-and-dems-kept-mum-about-its-downsides/article/2539185 (via shareaholic.com)

Cohn is right that there was no serious conversation about those tradeoffs back when Congress was considering the law's passage in 2009 and 2010. But why was that? It was because President Obama and his Democratic allies could not speak seriously — and honestly — about those tradeoffs and still pass their bill.

So instead, Obama assured Americans they could keep health care policies they liked. And it wasn't just Obama. "One of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August 2009. "If you like what you have, you can keep it," said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in October of the same year.

Many, many Democrats promised the same thing. They had to. If they had declared openly that millions of Americans would lose their current coverage and face higher premiums and deductibles — if Obama and Democratic leaders had said that, they would not have been able to maintain party unity in support of the bill, and the Affordable Care Act would never have passed Congress.

It would not have mattered that Republicans opposed the bill unanimously. A frank public discussion of Obamacare would have divided Democratic support, with the result being no new law at all.

Obamacare, Deconstructed - YouTube

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxWMbqxgMDo#t=113 (via shareaholic.com)

Lies of Obamacare, documented

From PowerLine

Given the lies with which Obamacare was promoted–"If you like your health care plan, you can keep it"–this is of course a blockbuster story. So I spent some time today tracking down the original sources to verify it.

The Obama administration projected low-end, mid-range and high-end estimates for how many plans would be terminated, in total and broken down between large and smaller employers. The bottom line is that the administration expected 51% of all employer plans to be terminated as a result of Obamacare. That is the mid-range estimate; the high-end estimate was 69%. So as of 2010, the Obama administration planned that most Americans with employer-sponsored health care plans would lose them, whether they liked those plans or not.

In the Federal Register, the administration candidly acknowledged:

The collective decisions of plan sponsors and issuers over time can be viewed as a one-way sorting process in which these parties decide whether, and when, to relinquish status as a grandfathered health plan.

The administration was prepared to be patient as the "one-way sorting process" ran its course, and all Americans lost the plans they had, whether they liked them or not.

--

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle