Ding Dong the Obamacare Witch is Dead Part IV

Well, well, it’s a slow and painful death for the American people.  Obamacare is taking whole swaths of people down with it.  To start with, the 5 million people whose insurance plans were cancelled are now scrambling to find insurance through the expensive, behemoth of healthcare exchanges.

So what does the White House do?  Some Obama aide signed Obama up for a Bronze Plan.  The Bronze Plan is the crappiest plan on a menu of crap plans.  According to the White House, Obama will pay $400 per month for a plan with a $6000 deductible.  

Seeing Obama has the best healthcare in the World, just look at Dick Cheney’s medical history, it was a purely symbolic gesture that served no purpose whatsoever but to rub it into the people’s collective noses that there is one healthcare system for the rich and powerful and one for everyone else.


According to a 49 state cost analysis by Forbes:

One of the fundamental flaws of the Affordable Care Act is that, despite its name, it makes health insurance more expensive. Today, the Manhattan Institute released the most comprehensive analysis yet conducted of premiums under Obamacare for people who shop for coverage on their own. Here’s what we learned. In the average state, Obamacare will increase underlying premiums by 41 percent.

As we have long expected, the steepest hikes will be imposed on the healthy, the young, and the male. And Obamacare’s taxpayer-funded subsidies will primarily benefit those nearing retirement.

Yes, the “average” percent of increase in the 49 states is 41%.  One question I have is, if the average increase in the 49 states is 41%, who is gaining by the Affordable Care Act.  Or put another way, who are the winners?

Even with the insurance rates increasing 41% on average for all Americans there is still a huge taxpayer bailout coming by the end of 2014.  Hidden deep in the bowels of the crappy Obamacare legislation is an insurance company bailout called “risk corridor”.

A recent article in the Canada Free Press lays out the scenario to come.

An American public already reeling from the catastrophic rollout of ObamaCare will more than likely be hearing an unfamiliar term being bandied about in the new year. “Risk corridor” refers to a provision in the law that allows the government to “stabilize” premium costs for insurance companies during the first three years of the healthcare rollout.

If insurance companies’ “target” costs for providing healthcare has been miscalculated, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will intercede on their behalf. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer illuminates the nature of that intercession.

“The insurers understand that they’re going to be completely ruined,” Krauthammer explains. “And what’s going to happen as a result of this? There’s only one way out, a huge government bailout of the insurers is waiting at the end of next year.” More accurately, it will be a taxpayer-funded bailout, similar to the ones given to the banks and the car companies.

That’s right, written into the Obamacare Law is a huge taxpayer bailout.  Obamacare is designed to fail and when it does, the American people lose and Wall Street wins.  For instance, there is a reinsurance provision that says insurance companies whose costs exceed $60,000 per year will be reimbursed from a $10 billion fund.  The $10 billion dollar find is paid for by levying a $63 tax on all healthcare plans, even employer sponsored plans.

More from the Canada Free Press Article:

On Monday, November 25, the administration lowered the reinsurance threshold from $60,000 to $45,000. This move will likely transfer billions of additional dollars from taxpayers to the insurance companies, even as it adds billions of dollars to the national debt. 

But don’t look to Republicans to offer anything other than the same claptrap they have been offering since Reagan decimated the healthcare system in the U.S.  First they want to have tort reform.  They claim that medical costs are up due to physicians practicing “defensive medicine”. 

According to conservatives, defensive medicine is when a doctor orders more tests than are necessary in order to protect themselves from lawsuits. 

Forbes had an article in August 2013 called Defensive Medicine: A Cure Worse Than The Disease with some interesting tidbits.

In states such as California, Texas and Massachusetts, where tort reform has been enacted, there has been no decline in the amount of defensive medicine.  A study published in the August 2013 edition of Health Affairs found that physicians practice defensive medicine based on perceived risk….

The only way to eliminate defensive medicine is to make it impossible for doctors to be sued for medical errors.

The Patients’ Compensation System, now under consideration in Georgia and Florida legislatures, would eliminate the possibility of any physician or hospital ever being sued again…

Currently, very few patients who are harmed are compensated for their loss.  A recent report by Emory University scholar Joanna Shepherd-Bailey found that attorneys rarely take cases in which compensation is less than $500,000.

The other Republican plans such as selling insurance across state lines are too nonsensical to even bother with. 

While champagne corks fly in boardrooms and on Wall Street as the stock market hits yet another high, America weeps.  Obama’s Happy New Year to America: cuts in Social Security and Medicare, loss of long term unemployment benefits, cuts to veteran’s pensions, new co-pays and deductibles for veteran’s care and the highest unemployment since the great depression. 

Ding, dong the Obamacare Witch is Dead.  Thanks Democrats for something worse than nothing.

By Patricia Baeten