Obamacare, arguably the worst piece of Soviet-style top-down legislation ever authored by a single political party, is in its death spiral. Both Barack Obama and the economic architect Jonathan Gruber are still trying to save Obamacare.
Barack Obama, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, where he received another award that he didn’t earn, urged Congress to “find courage to defend his healthcare reforms.” Obama claimed that 20 million people who were uninsured received healthcare under Obamacare. Obama failed to mention the millions of people who lost their healthcare, lost their health plans and lost their doctors because of Obamacare.
Incredulously, Jonathan Gruber, who once called the American people “stupid” because Gruber and the Democrats easily fooled the American public. During a panel event in 2013, Gruber admitted that the Obama administration went through byzantine measures to keep the facts about the Obamacare legislation away from the American people, including the massive transfer of wealth from the healthy to the sick.
Gruber complained that, “You can’t do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored that mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical to get the thing to pass.”
Now, facing the demise of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber is blaming President Trump Obamacare’s impending death. Like Hillary and Obama, the left can never be held accountable for their actions. They always have to blame someone else.
Insurance costs continue to rise. Insurance company premiums fail to cover medical costs. Obamacare plans continue to lose money, forcing insurance companies out of the Obamcare market. In 2008, the average employer-sponsored family-plan cost $12,680, with employee picking up $3,354 of the cost. In 2016, the cost of an average employer family plan was $18,142, up 43 percent, with workers paying $5,277 of the cost, up 57 percent of the cost.
One of the stated goals of Obamacare was increased competition. In 2017, there is less competition than ever before in Obamacare. Over two-third of counties within the United States will have no choice or just one insurer in Obamacare exchanges. The decrease in number of health plans competing in Obamacare exchanges means decreased competition. Decreased competition means higher prices.
Originally, the Obama administration stated that there were 46 million people uninsured. Subtracting those who qualified for Medicaid and CHIP programs reduced that number to about 31 million. Obamacare was ostensibly designed to provide health coverage to the uninsured. But the Congressional Budget Office projected that by 2023, ten years after implementation, 31 million people will remain uninsured. That’s about the same number of people uninsured before Obamacare. So Obamacare wasted billion of dollars with little or no discernable effect on the uninsured.
The true cost of Obamacare was never truly revealed. First, the Democrats removed $500 billion from Medicare, endangering senior citizens. Then the CBO scored Obamacare at $900 billion over ten years. In order to achieve this less than $1 trillion cost estimate, games were played. Costs were delayed by two years to show front–end solvency. Savings were double-counted. Rosy expectations of reduced costs were added where necessary. In 2014, the CBO data showed the true cost of Obamacare over ten years to be $1.8 trillion, or double the original estimate.
Obamacare introduced massive uncertainty into the job market. Small employers, in an effort to avoid the penalties of Obamacare, reduced the number of full time employees, relied instead on lower paid part-time employees, stopped hiring, and hunkered down. This killed the job market. The end result was employees worked less because only part-time jobs were available, made less money and, as a result, could not afford to purchase government mandated insurance even if it was available.
In October 2015, James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal, wrote, “Obamacare will almost inevitably be reopened in 2017, whoever wins the election. That’s because young and healthy people continue to steer clear of this wealth-transfer scheme. The result is that in 11 states in 2014, the average plan paid more in claims that it collected in premiums.”
So now, we have to clean up this mess created by Democrats and Democrats alone. The mess includes healthcare premiums that equal small house payment that include $10,000 or more in out of pocket costs. Obama promised Obamacare would lower health care costs; on the contrary, Obamacare dramatically increased the cost of health care. This is what happens when politicans, who know nothing about how the real world works, design a health system for political reasons instead of health reasons.
Obamacare was passed against the wishes of the American people. Democrats hoped Obamacare would “grow” on people over time. Over 95% of the polls taken since Obamacare became law showed Americans were against Obamacare by double digits usually.
In order to revive state insurance markets, drive down cost and increase competition, Obamacare must be repealed. In 2013, the year Obamacare was enacted, the individual market contained 395 insurers selling insurance across all states. In 2017, there are only 218 insurers. This is a drop of 45 percent. This is why over two-thirds of counties have no choice or one choice with zero competition.