Say what you will about Obamacare, and after yesterday’s shocking SCOTUS decision (Supreme Court saves Obamacare | CNN.com) it looks like it is here to stay until the Congress can do something to repeal and replace it with something that will come close to doing what it said it would do for the people. The problem is we are more than five (5) years since its passing into law and parts of the law have been suspended, delayed, deemed implausible, too confusing to navigate, and too expensive to support or participate in.
What the law promised as sold to the public is that costs of care would be lower and also since people would have more regular access to health care. Also it would lower emergency room (ER) waiting times because they would take better care of themselves to minimize the risk of needing to go to the ER or urgent care. It also promised if the families were not able to afford coverage and their incomes were below a specific amount they would be eligible or federal federal subsidy to be reevaluated each year. The plans were going to be simple to understand and easy to sign up for and if you liked your current doctor you can keep him/her. Finally this was to be revenue neutral, meaning the program would be self sustaining.
But what we got was a program that only guaranteed winner are the insurance companies themselves. When you force everyone to pay for a product your company distributes with government fiat. When the latest challenge to Obamacare was thwarted by SCOTUS the insurance industry sector on the various stock exchanges rose by as much as 20% during the remainder of the trading day as a result of the favorable ruling.
Insurers, Hospitals Relieved as Supreme Court Upholds Subsidies | WSJ.com
But what we got was a bloated program that is overloaded with unnecessary coverages and does little. We still have patients putting off care due to cost of treatment. We still have problems when it comes to people signing up or trying to apply for insurance over the exchanges. ER waiting times are at a all-time high. For as much as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was supposed to make healthcare more affordable it has become even more not being so. The only thing that this law has done was ensure the insurance companies continue to have the upper hand when it comes to patient. Regardless of how you feel about the law’s merrits it is never a good idea to have people who truly need care having to make a choice of getting treatment or buying the necessities of life like food for example.
Cost of Health Care Has Risen
Each year health care plans rise due to the pressures of inflation in the marketplace, but this year health insurance companies are asking the federal government they can be allowed to increase their rates anywhere up to over 40% the previous year’s rate. Anyone faced with a increase of 40% for any good or service would look at eliminating that demand, but Obamacare makes that a unlawful act. Now with the actual title of the Obamacare law itself, The Affordable Care Act (ACA), one would be led to believe that healthcare would be more affordable than it was before the legislation. The reason why healthcare is more expensive now than it was ever before is with the cost of any good or service you wish to acquire the price is determined by the economic laws of supply and demand. When the demand for a service or product increases the supply of this product decreases which makes the cost go up. Also what causes a price for something go up is when the cost of that something rises due to the laws of supply and demand.
Now with the insurance market the supply of policies are infinite, but the costs are based on the amount of services and those costs the plans are going to the supply of insurance is actually infinite, but the costs to supply has risen substantially. Obamacare has made certain procedures, exams, treatment and medicines to be available for a patient no matter if the consumer (you) are interested in them. For example if you are a life long non-smoker why would you need to pay for anything related to smoking? There are other services and treatments that you are not interested in, but must participate in. You shouldn’t, but you are because the federal government states your plan must support it. It is because of this it is the main reasons why the costs to supply has risen significantly.
Also since no person shall be disqualified for coverage, or forced to take a different plan than they would have wanted. As a result the costs of the supply had risen because these are people who would need more services than a more healthy person. What has happened was existing patients got forced into new plans that weighed them down with more costs and also the deductibles for the plans have gone up increasing the out of pocket costs for them.
ER Waiting Times Has Increased
What the administration has hoped for by decreasing ER waiting times did not pan out. What happened was the people who refused to buy the insurance had decided to wait until they needed to go see a doctor in the ER and pay the fine later on. Also even more people who had this new coverage went to the ER, the problem is people will not go see a doctor until they get sick. These plans are riddled with preventive care which means you need to go see the doctor proactively to do this, but most people only go to the doctor when they get sick. Also most people in today’s economy cannot afford to miss work to go see a doctor when urgent care or ER are open during more convenient hours. Also with more people having medical insurance and who refuse to go see a doctor unless absolutely needing one have added more patients to the ER.
The Health Care Exchanges Are Still Broken
With the multiple of millions spent on the federal healthcare exchange and the exchange of electronic records going to all of these different health insurance companies have been and still continues to be a disaster. When you exchange data with different organizations for anything you need to make sure that you provide all of the necessary information correctly or the receiver of the data cannot do anything with it. In the IT industry everything is predicated on data, there’s an entire industry that is dedicated for the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which regulates and consults on what data is necessary and how it needs to be formatted in order to successfully exchange data with another organization. 99% of the world’s business is operated on this process, the largest company in this industry is located just outside of Washington D. C. so the talent is closely available.
But with the utter incompetence of the government for anything in the IT industry, which we found out recently is far their ineptitude is. Did not count on the the sheer volume of people who would be accessing this portal, you have a country of over 300 million and you had 700 thousand applicants on the first day and these were the people who were able to get into the portal and actually sign up for a insurance plan. The problem is out of the 700,000 applicants for insurance only six (6) actually had their applications accepted.
Memo Reveals Only 6 People Signed Up for Obamacare on First Day | ABC News
How can this happen? How could a well funded project of this magnitude fail so badly? According to the White House, democrats, professions and liberals it was the GOP’s fault.
NBC Reporter Tries to Blame House GOP for ObamaCare Website Failure | newsbusters.org
But according to the industry experts, computer and EDI professionals all knew that it was the group that was responsible for the roll out under the leadership of then Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius (who also blamed the GOP) and the sheer incompetence of her entire department. The problem is the government who was suppose to bring in more regulation into a highly regulated industry did not consult with any experts in the field of the work they needed to do, it would be like trying to design a car without ever knowing how they are made. You see they required input because you have all of these companies who require a lot of the same information as the other insurers, but they use it differently and needed some additional details depending on the company involved.
Doctors Opt Out From Practice and Obamacare
While you can regulate an insurance industry and you can force people to buy it (even though the tenth amendment makes that unconstitutional) you cannot force doctors to participate or accept those insurance plans. Many doctors saw their administrative costs go up due to the new regulations involved in this new law. I will admit it has some good points by forcing practices to invest in making records and prescriptions electronic format, but again you cannot force participation. What many doctors have decided to do is retire, go teach medical school or be forced to work for a large medical conglomerate instead of having their own practice due to the overhead costs. Also unless you are smart, feel comfortable for being saddled with hundreds of thousands in student loans and face the prospect of being sued for misdiagnosing a cold you too could become a doctor. If it was easy everyone would do it, but over regulation will make becoming a doctor less attractive. So we have less medical practitioners for a ever growing patient pool.
Shady Accounting Confessed in Obamacare Budget by HHS
HHS Secretary Sebelius admits to double-counting in Obamacare budget | The Daily Caller
For accounting practices that would have landed any normal person in the middle of an IRS audit and possibly prison the HHS Secretary, that same Sebelius person, admitted that she double counted $500 Billion in the original budget for the program. This was caught by the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee when reviewing the budget along with some of the other Sebelius statements and documents that she could not do so with the law. She claimed that she was saving that $500 Billion for future funding of Medicare and also using that same sum to fund Obamacare. No matter how the government likes to spend money no one has figured out how to spend the same dollar twice and not acquire more debt.
Obamacare Chose the Winners and Losers in the Economy
No government should choose which industries should prosper or suffer of those industries are a mutual benefit for the public. So with forcing unwilling customers into a new product the administration has decided that the insurers and medical facilities are the winners while the medical device makers are losers. How are device maker the loser? Is in order to help fund the ACA a 2.3% tax has been levied on the entire industry. So an industry dedicated to making devices to improve the quality of life or more likely extend someone’s life is to tax them for it? Also you would need to sell an awful lot of them to help pay for a program that costs multiples of trillions. Now law makers want to overturn the device maker tax, because it is unnecessarily punitive for no real cause, and now have even less funding for the program.
Hundreds of Companies Who Welcome the Law File For Waivers
List of Obamacare Exempt Companies | FreeRepublic.com
When you have many of the CEOs of the largest companies in the country praise the benefits of the law file for waivers from it how could it be so good for us? The waivers allow them to supply their employees benefits with no cap.
Patient Deductibles are Forcing Patients to Put Off Medical Care
Personally I have seen my deductibles for my employer sponsored insurance plan rise over 600% over the past 8 years, my medical plan is a very nice one, or at least it was before Obamacare has forced employers to reduce the coverage they can offer for their employees, apparently the politics involved think that we all should be poor and sick together. But since Obamacare’s implementation the percentage of covered workers who’e deductibles above $1,000.00 has gone from less than 20% to over 40% as of 2014.
Dilemma over deductibles: Costs crippling middle class | USA Today
Now for the lower income families it is worse. In order to pay for their plans and to keep the cost of the plans low many patients are forced to buy into what’s called a high deductible insurance plan, these plans have typical patient deductible costs over $5,000.00. The benefits are the monthly insurance plans are low, but often the patients who need healthcare while on this plan cannot afford the deductible payments associated with the cost of care. So as before the patients are going without care while still being forced to pay for insurance. It is never a good idea to force people to choose between health care and items like food or having to take less than the prescribed amount of their medication in order for them to last longer which may make the treatment not effective because of the lower dose.
The Law Proves Too Complex to Understand
When you need to hire as many office personnel as you do medical personnel to maintain your compliance for this new law then where is the cost savings?
11,588,500 Words: Obamacare Regs 30x as Long as Law | csnnews.com
Say what you will about the legislation, but it is over 2,000 pages of regulation which is more than 30x the length of the bill text itself. This legislation references parts of additional laws which requires people to navigate another 38,000 pages of text to understand how this law ties into those other ones. No wonder a lot of people still don’t know exactly how the bill works. Also there has been many delays in deadline for the portions of the law they have been to enforce.
When then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, stated, “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it.” I have one question, “Now that we know what’s in it can we repeal it or have a bipartisan bill that actually will provide better coverage, make health care affordable, allow people to not participate if they chose, and eliminate the need for companies from asking for waivers on the benefit caps they are forced to adhere to or make it so no one gets one”
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