Hey, tenth anniversary of Obamcare!! Are Dems celebrating? Wait, how did that work out?
A notable anniversary occurring this month: It's been ten years since Obama and a totally Democrat-controlled congress rammed the laughably-named "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" down our throats.
It was a “perfect storm,” with Democrats owning majority control of both houses of congress and the Presidency. It was a socialist dream come true, and with an unrestrained determination they passed the legislation in March, 2010--without a single Republican vote.
Obama's legacy--supposedly covering everyone in the nation for all medical problems--had finally arrived. They repeately promised that premiums and deductibles will go down. "The average family will save $2,500 per year," said Obama. "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. If you like your [existing health insurance] plan you can keep your plan, period!”
They kept making those golden promises over and over again, reassuring Americans who were highly skeptical. Well-founded objections to this total overhaul of our medical system were airily dismissed as conspiracy scare-stories.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is on video bizarrely claiming that “We have to pass the bill so we can find out what's in it.”
Obama and his lackeys stridently claimed that forcing Americans to either buy Obamacare insurance or pay a fine was NOT a tax, and the Obama administration's own attorneys claiming the same before the Supreme Court, the chief justice of that court ignored those claims and RULED that the "individual mandate" WAS a tax.
He made that ruling because if the mandate had NOT been ruled a tax, it wouldn't have been constitutional.
Voila! Defect remedied. Except courts aren't supposed to re-write laws, but are supposed to rule on whether laws are constitutional AS WRITTEN.
It got worse fast. Turns out you could only keep your doctor and your existing plan if they met the mandates imposed by government bureaucrats--which included free contraception for women over 65. It was ILLEGAL for any insurer to offer health insurance that didn't provide that. Does that make sense? No, but...bureaucrats. Standardization, comrade.
Obama and the Democrats had promised that premiums, copayments and deductibles for “approved” plans would all be lower than those under the private policies people had had before. Instead all three shot up, not down.
Participating insurers abandoned state "health exchanges" by the dozens, and those state "co-ops" collapsed. Private companies dropped costly insurance benefits, including family benefits. Thousands of doctors threatened to retire. The president handed out administrative exemptions like candy.
None of this was surprising, because this entire disaster was hastily and badly conceived, then passed by one party only. The main architect of the monstrosity admitted--repeatedly, on video--that they couldn't have passed it without the “stupidity” of Americans.
Obama chided us that “Elections have consequences,” Yes they did, eh?
The failure of ObamaCare should have been a teachable moment for every Amercan, including Democrats. Of course zealous socialists aren't capable of learning. Instead they seem determined to outdo each other in offering free medical care not only for Americans, but also for illegal aliens.
Now come fervent calls for single-payer health care coverage. What could possibly go wrong?
Single-payer will rescue nothing and will only lead to mediocrity and shortages characteristic of the dystopian health care nightmares of Britain and Canada. The already spotty record of the federal VA hospitals inspires little confidence.
====
With $2.4 billion in start-up loans and "solvency" grants, Obamacare created 23 "health insurance co-ops." The Obama lackeys assured taxpayers that they shouldn't worry about those loans because the government had carefully screened co-op applicants and picked those that showed a "high probability of financial viability."
They promised voters that because the co-ops were run by governments and didn't have to answer to investors, they'd be more efficient and more focused on patients. As one of the co-ops put it, these were "plans for people, not for profit." In addition, they'd provide a great source of competition for conventional for-profit insurers.
Right from the start there were warning signs that the co-ops would collapse. Vermont's supposedly financially viable co-op failed before it even got started.
Then less than a year after opening for business, Iowa's CoOpportunity Health closed. Despite $145 million in start-up loans and signing up tens of thousands of members in Iowa and neighboring Nebraska, the co-op had quickly burned through its cash.
In July of 2015 a report from the Department of Health and Human Service's Inspector General warned that all the co-ops but one was hemorrhaging money. More than half had net losses of at least $15 million in their first year. More crucial for voters, the IG also found that, despite all the rosy promises of lower prices due to either competition or being run by government workers, many co-ops had set premiums higher than policies sold by commercial insurers.
A month later, Nevada's co-op announced that it was going out of business. Seven more followed suit in October.
And of course when the "exchanges" or co-ops failed, all their customers had to scramble to find another insurance carrier. And in many cases consumers weren't left with many other choices. Surviving exchanges began asking the Obama administration to approve double-digit premium increases.
Mismanagement was everywhere: 18 of the 23 CO-OPs were paying top executives up to half a million dollars a year. For a non-competitive, non-profit, government job. It was insane.
But poor management was just part of the problem. Failure was unavoidable because of the rules Obamacare itself imposed: The law banned insurers from pricing coverage based on risk.
To make the math for this scheme work, Obamacare created a series of cross-subsidies called "risk adjustment." Insurers who attracted less expensive, healthier-than-average enrollees were supposed to pay into a fund that would redistribute money to those who enrolled costlier, sicker-than-average patients.
Several co-ops ended up facing big "risk adjustment" bills -- even though they were losing money. HealthyCT, for example, had to grapple with a $13.4 million bill, which immediately made the plan financially unstable. Oregon's Health co-op -- which lost $18 million last year -- had hoped to get $5 million from the risk adjustment program. Instead, it received a $900,000 bill. Unsurprisingly, it folded.
Maybe the health-insurance business was a bit more...um...sophisticated than the Democrats thought, eh?
Today only one of the 23 state health co-ops remains in operation. Yet Biden, Sanders, Warren and all the other Dem presidential candidates think government-run health care is a great idea.
H/T Sally Pipes. Also here.
It was a “perfect storm,” with Democrats owning majority control of both houses of congress and the Presidency. It was a socialist dream come true, and with an unrestrained determination they passed the legislation in March, 2010--without a single Republican vote.
Obama's legacy--supposedly covering everyone in the nation for all medical problems--had finally arrived. They repeately promised that premiums and deductibles will go down. "The average family will save $2,500 per year," said Obama. "If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. If you like your [existing health insurance] plan you can keep your plan, period!”
They kept making those golden promises over and over again, reassuring Americans who were highly skeptical. Well-founded objections to this total overhaul of our medical system were airily dismissed as conspiracy scare-stories.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is on video bizarrely claiming that “We have to pass the bill so we can find out what's in it.”
Obama and his lackeys stridently claimed that forcing Americans to either buy Obamacare insurance or pay a fine was NOT a tax, and the Obama administration's own attorneys claiming the same before the Supreme Court, the chief justice of that court ignored those claims and RULED that the "individual mandate" WAS a tax.
He made that ruling because if the mandate had NOT been ruled a tax, it wouldn't have been constitutional.
Voila! Defect remedied. Except courts aren't supposed to re-write laws, but are supposed to rule on whether laws are constitutional AS WRITTEN.
It got worse fast. Turns out you could only keep your doctor and your existing plan if they met the mandates imposed by government bureaucrats--which included free contraception for women over 65. It was ILLEGAL for any insurer to offer health insurance that didn't provide that. Does that make sense? No, but...bureaucrats. Standardization, comrade.
Obama and the Democrats had promised that premiums, copayments and deductibles for “approved” plans would all be lower than those under the private policies people had had before. Instead all three shot up, not down.
Participating insurers abandoned state "health exchanges" by the dozens, and those state "co-ops" collapsed. Private companies dropped costly insurance benefits, including family benefits. Thousands of doctors threatened to retire. The president handed out administrative exemptions like candy.
None of this was surprising, because this entire disaster was hastily and badly conceived, then passed by one party only. The main architect of the monstrosity admitted--repeatedly, on video--that they couldn't have passed it without the “stupidity” of Americans.
Obama chided us that “Elections have consequences,” Yes they did, eh?
The failure of ObamaCare should have been a teachable moment for every Amercan, including Democrats. Of course zealous socialists aren't capable of learning. Instead they seem determined to outdo each other in offering free medical care not only for Americans, but also for illegal aliens.
Now come fervent calls for single-payer health care coverage. What could possibly go wrong?
Single-payer will rescue nothing and will only lead to mediocrity and shortages characteristic of the dystopian health care nightmares of Britain and Canada. The already spotty record of the federal VA hospitals inspires little confidence.
====
With $2.4 billion in start-up loans and "solvency" grants, Obamacare created 23 "health insurance co-ops." The Obama lackeys assured taxpayers that they shouldn't worry about those loans because the government had carefully screened co-op applicants and picked those that showed a "high probability of financial viability."
They promised voters that because the co-ops were run by governments and didn't have to answer to investors, they'd be more efficient and more focused on patients. As one of the co-ops put it, these were "plans for people, not for profit." In addition, they'd provide a great source of competition for conventional for-profit insurers.
Right from the start there were warning signs that the co-ops would collapse. Vermont's supposedly financially viable co-op failed before it even got started.
Then less than a year after opening for business, Iowa's CoOpportunity Health closed. Despite $145 million in start-up loans and signing up tens of thousands of members in Iowa and neighboring Nebraska, the co-op had quickly burned through its cash.
In July of 2015 a report from the Department of Health and Human Service's Inspector General warned that all the co-ops but one was hemorrhaging money. More than half had net losses of at least $15 million in their first year. More crucial for voters, the IG also found that, despite all the rosy promises of lower prices due to either competition or being run by government workers, many co-ops had set premiums higher than policies sold by commercial insurers.
A month later, Nevada's co-op announced that it was going out of business. Seven more followed suit in October.
And of course when the "exchanges" or co-ops failed, all their customers had to scramble to find another insurance carrier. And in many cases consumers weren't left with many other choices. Surviving exchanges began asking the Obama administration to approve double-digit premium increases.
Mismanagement was everywhere: 18 of the 23 CO-OPs were paying top executives up to half a million dollars a year. For a non-competitive, non-profit, government job. It was insane.
But poor management was just part of the problem. Failure was unavoidable because of the rules Obamacare itself imposed: The law banned insurers from pricing coverage based on risk.
To make the math for this scheme work, Obamacare created a series of cross-subsidies called "risk adjustment." Insurers who attracted less expensive, healthier-than-average enrollees were supposed to pay into a fund that would redistribute money to those who enrolled costlier, sicker-than-average patients.
Several co-ops ended up facing big "risk adjustment" bills -- even though they were losing money. HealthyCT, for example, had to grapple with a $13.4 million bill, which immediately made the plan financially unstable. Oregon's Health co-op -- which lost $18 million last year -- had hoped to get $5 million from the risk adjustment program. Instead, it received a $900,000 bill. Unsurprisingly, it folded.
Maybe the health-insurance business was a bit more...um...sophisticated than the Democrats thought, eh?
Today only one of the 23 state health co-ops remains in operation. Yet Biden, Sanders, Warren and all the other Dem presidential candidates think government-run health care is a great idea.
H/T Sally Pipes. Also here.
posted by SF at
7:14 PM
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