Well now we know.
The Internal Revenue Service, the enforcement agency for Obamacare, has some news for us. The cost of Obamacare for the average American family (4 or 5 family members) will be $20,000 annually.
Their estimate is based on the “Bronze” plan, which is the least expensive. I don’t know the details of the “Bronze” plan or the other levels of coverage, but I assume this would be the lowest level of care and/or highest out-of-pocket costs beyond the price of that $20,000 premium. The penalty, or according to Chief Justice John Roberts, the tax for not buying insurance will be $2,400.
So, fast forward a couple of years when Obamacare has been fully implemented and you’re sitting at the kitchen table working out the family budget. (You might want to invite your senator and show him how that’s done.) You weigh the cost of buying an insurance policy for your family against that penalty (tax.) Knowing that insurance companies can no longer penalize you for a pre-existing condition, you would most likely forgo the insurance and just wait and see if anyone in the family gets sick or injured. Under these conditions, insurance companies will be out of business in no time.
The promise that President Obama made to us that we could keep our insurance and we could keep our doctors is being exposed for the whopper it was. How can you keep your current insurance if your insurance company is forced out of business? How can you keep your doctor if he looks at the monster we’ve created, packs his bags and moves to the Caymans?
And remember all those low-income people that Obamacare was supposed to cover? (This was the main reason for the program, or so we were told.) Well, that’s not working out so well. Moe Lane explains in a post at RedState.com:
“…the government is forcing everybody to buy health insurance. The government is also mandating the existence of health care exchanges. If somebody theoretically can’t afford the exchanges, then they theoretically can get subsidies. The rule of thumb for ‘affordability’ was capped at a level designed to keep people from simply dropping their employer coverage. But the rule of thumb was also capped assuming average costs for individual coverage, not average costs for family coverage. As a result, some families will be left in a bad situation: they don’t get family coverage from their employers, they aren’t able to afford the new exchange policies on their own, and they can’t get subsidized because they’re over a badly-designed arbitrary affordability level. And, of course, this is all disproportionally targeting lower-income families.”
This would all be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. The excuse we were given was to provide insurance for those who currently can’t afford it. To “fix” this we are about to dismantle our entire healthcare system, drive the cost of healthcare out of reach of the middle class, and the people who this was intended to help will be worse off than when all this began.
Many of us warned of this. Obamacare – The Affordable Care Act – was never about making healthcare affordable. It was about making the federal government the sole provider of healthcare for everyone in the nation – single payer.
We were lied to.
To their credit, every republican lawmaker opposed this and the legislation was passed without a single republican vote. This is entirely the work of the democrats. They are responsible for what’s about to happen to all of us. We had one last opportunity to stop all this with the last election, but the nation voted for the status quo. So I don’t know how to stop it anymore. Republican governors are standing firm, refusing to set up the state exchanges, but this will only buy us more time.
If nothing changes and the law is fully implemented, we will become a truly divided country. The rich, political class will pay for whatever top-notch care they want or need. The rest of us will become dependent on the state for our needs. We’ll go to our assigned doctor, we’ll have only those procedures they want us to have, only the medicines they approve. We’ll wait for months, maybe years for needed surgery. Privacy will be a fond memory. Without a free market, doctors, hospitals and other health workers will have no incentive to excel and we will all pay the price in a lower standard of care.
This is what happens when the press sacrifices its independence and integrity for ideology, and the public stops being informed. When no one is minding the store, the politicians are free to do as they please.
It seems like I should close this with a great, big “I told you so” but I can’t. It makes me sick and that’s a luxury I can no longer afford.
-Kathy
Here’s just one small example of what happens in health care when all decisions are left to the government. The President, who is personally taking credit for not only banning insurance companies from refusing to insure preexisting conditions, he also banned them from charging any additional premium for preexisting conditions, recently changed his mind and proclaimed that insurance companies can charge additional premiums to smokers because that’s a personal choice, not a preexisting condition.
It seems pretty clear that many smokers will not pay a smoker’s penalty, they’ll just opt out and pay the “fine”. That is, until they develop lung cancer, or some other life threatening disease, which, by the government’s rules, are preexisting conditions. Now, if they have “quit smoking” they can get health insurance without paying a penalty for smoking. You can’t make this stuff up and compete with government absurdity.
It is even worse than Max says. Not only can the insurance companies charge a hefty 50% premium for smokers, that additional 50% is not eligible for any government subsidy. So, we end up with the absurd situation that a smoker person making $30K / year is expected to pay, out of pocket, $10K a year for his health insurance. Sure,l that’ll work.
The new medical device tax of 2.3% on gross revenues (not profits) has just claimed another 100 victims. Smith and Nephew is laying off people due to the tax and they are not the only ones. Great, just great: lose your job and be forced into an expensive health insurance plan.
On top of all this, the legislation nobody read before voting, says that the only way the Federal government can subsidize the health care premiums is via state insurance exchange. If the state does not set one up, the Federal government is required to and they do not have the manpower. Plus, of course, if the Feds set up the Exchange, no one is eligible for subsidies.
It would be hard to have written a more inept law than these Democrats wrote and then passed. The catch 22 is that if Obama wants to reopen the legislation to fix these myriad of problems, we probably would not get single payer. We would get repeal of ObamaCare. So, don’t look to Obama and the Democrats to try to fix this monstrosity.
Kathy is right, the goal of this legislation was never to fix health care it was all about single payer. Many Democrats wanted single payer but felt it would cost them votes so, in behind those closed doors where this legislation was passed, they put forth a bill which makes success almost impossible leaving government single payer to be looked upon as saving the health care system.
I can think of no piece of legislation put forward that has such a duplicitous goal and, again Kathy is right, our illustrious free press never asked the pertinent questions to point out the numerous flaws. They are either in on it or too ignorant to be asking the questions. My guess is a little of both.