The drumbeat of bad news about Obamacare continues unabated. Over the past few weeks, (1) The nation’s largest insurer has pulled out of most state exchanges, citing losses of more than $1 billion in the past two years. The reason? Unbalanced demographics, with relatively juvenile and robust people avoiding the unpopular program (largely because lack of affordability), leaving their risk pools burdened older, infirmed consumers which are more pricey to insure. (2) Congressional Budget Office again reduced its enrollment forecasts, further reducing its previously revised figure by 8 million people. (3) The impartial judge also predicted that the number of uninsured Americans would raise raise about 2 million over the next decade. (4) AND fresh report indicated that as many as eight of the eleven remaining Obamacare cooperatives will likely fail within the next year, joining the pile of ashes of more than a dozen previous state-level bankruptcies. (5) Former Obama administration official now president of major health insurance lobbying group Planned additional premium increases next year, as confirmed by industry experts who warned that additional market departures and rate increases will be needed to offset the higher-than-expected costs of participating in Obamacare. And now it looks like the law is forcing insurance companies put
Insurance companies are Setting the stage for significant increases in ObamaCare health insurance premiumsopening a line of attack for Republicans in an election year. Many insurers are losing money in the ObamaCare markets, in part because they set their premiums too low when the plans went into effect in 2014. Companies are now expected to seek significant price increases… Insurers are already arguing for premium increases, pointing to a smaller, sicker and more pricey group of policyholders than they had expected. Blue Cross Blue Shield released a widely publicized report last month that found that fresh patients covered by ObamaCare faced 22 percent higher health care costs than people who obtained coverage through their employers.The industry is clearly preparing the ground for larger premium increases in 2017,” said Larry Levitt, a health law expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. The premium hike proposals, which will be rolled out over the next few months, must still be approved by state insurance commissioners. The ultimate impact on consumers will be complex to determine because ObamaCare tax breaks often aid mitigate the effects.
Here’s the problem with this silver lining of “softening the blow”: These tax subsidies don’t grow on trees. They’re paid for with taxpayer money as part of a redistributive scheme that relies on a lot of Obamacare Tax HikesEven heavily subsidized Americans are finding that affordable insurance remains out of their reach due to prohibitively high own costs. Sure, these people could pay relatively paltry monthly payments thanks to the mandatory generosity of their fellow Americans, but for this insurance to work, they first have to exhaust deductibles that run into the thousands of dollars. For many of them, this means that their much-vaunted insurance effectively useless. And now the premiums are rising again, adding insult to injury. Leftists will either reject all this evidence and blindly applaud the law’s “success” – Hillary Clinton preferred approach as the Godmother of Obamacare — or cite her as evidence that a full-blown, single-payer government is necessary. That’s the preference of Bernie Sanders, who never mentions that his own leftist state scrapped planned adoption of a unified health care system because it was absurdly, ruinously pricey. While we’re on the subject of unified health care systems, Here is the latest information from the British NHS utopia:
Junior doctors walked off routine and acute care units at 08:00 UK time. The strike, for the first time, includes emergency, maternity and intensive care units.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he was disappointed the strike had come to a halt but reiterated the government would not back down and stop the imposition of a fresh contract. The strike ends at 5pm UK time, with further action due to take place at the same time on Wednesday in protest at the imposition of a fresh contract from the summer. Speaking to the BBC, Mr Hunt described the day as a “very, very bleak” day for the NHS, but said no union had the power to stop the Government from delivering on its manifesto promises. “The reason this has happened is because the government has not been able to negotiate sensibly and reasonably with the BMA.” Before the strike, government sources indicated they could not back down because The dispute turned into a political conflict, with the BMA trying to overthrow the government and other unions watching the dispute “like hawks”.
When the government manages your healthcare, it can become a political pawn when interest groups, such as public sector unions, make decisions about it doctors strike would benefit their narrow financial or partisan interests. This is the same system that has been besieged by scandals involving patient beatings and terrible waiting time This to absorb governmental VA-System here in the United States. I’ll leave you with Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen describes Why Obamacare will long remain a shining jewel in the crown of this president’s national legacy of failures:
At home, Ronald Reagan told Americans, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Obama wanted to convince Americans that they weren’t terrifying. And he intended to do so with the one great liberal legislative achievement of his presidency: Obamacare. He failed. Even before he left office, Obamacare began to fall apart. The law passed over the opposition of a majority of Americans, a majority of Americans still oppose it—and their opposition was justified…Since commercial insurers are not willing to continue spending money to maintain Obamacare, they have three options: 1) reduce coverage, 2) raise prices, or 3) withdraw from the exchanges altogether. More and more people are choosing Option 3. Does this mean that Obamacare is finally entering a “death spiral”? Not quite. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Scott Gottlieb explains, as commercial insurers begin to phase out Obamacare, they are being replaced by Medicaid health maintenance organizations (HMOs) offering stingy plans that mirror what they offer in Medicaid—our national emergency health insurance program for the poorest of the indigent.
That’s a disaster for people trapped in Obamacare. About three-quarters of people on the exchanges were previously insured under commercial plans, either through their employers or in the individual market, according to a 2014 McKinsey study. They were doing fine without taxpayer-subsidized insurance, but were pushed into Obamacare. Now they face rising premiums and smaller provider networks — and as commercial insurers flee, they will increasingly be stuck with terrible plans like Medicaid. That’s not what the president promised when he sold Obamacare to Americans. The president promised that Obamacare would provide “more choice, more competition, lower costs.” Instead, Americans have fewer choices, less competition and higher costs.
In his 2013 commencement address at Ohio State, President Obama urged graduates to reject “cynical” critics of huge government. How is this government rehabilitation project going? Thiessen sums ups: “With Obamacare, Obama wanted to restore America’s faith in big government. Instead, the opposite happened. Today, 69 percent of Americans say big government is the “greatest threat to the country in the future” (ahead of huge business or huge labor). That number, down slightly from 72 percent in 2013, is higher under Obama than at any point since Gallup began asking the question about 50 years ago. Obamacare has done more to discredit huge government than 1,000 Reagan speeches. That, in the end, will be Obama’s lasting legacy to this country.” Amen. A huge, intrusive government—even with the good intentions of its supporters—is often a picture of incompetence. It fails to deliver on its lofty promises and too often hurts the very people it claims to aid while piling hard-working taxpayers on the table.
