Worse than fearedWithout fanfare or party favors we recently mourned Obamacare's one-year birthday. The mourning promises to ratchet up as perhaps America's single worst legislative assault on personal freedoms approaches full flower in 2014, when most of its major provisions kick in.
When it comes to statist intrusions and Big Brother doublespeak, it's hard to beat President Barack Obama's crowning achievement to bring the entire health care industry under government control
because he thinks he knows better. Who needs a free market when we've got top-level bureaucrats and political wizardry?So, what's Obamacare look like at age 1?
The
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act set out to extend health care coverage to nearly everyone. The day it was born it was clear it would fall at least 21 million people short of universal coverage.
Since then, nearly every insurance company has stopped offering child-only policies because they no longer can charge higher premiums for sicker kids.
Some companies, including 3M, have stopped offering health benefits to retirees and low-income workers.
Obamacare also promised to rein in costs. How has that worked out?
Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius
confessed under congressional questioning recently that Obamacare financial wizards double-counted. Money the administration claimed to save by cutting Medicare was money it also claimed to spend ? twice. Obama's bureaucrats planned to use $500 billion to fund Obamacare. And to sustain Medicare. "The same dollar can't be used twice," complained Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., after Sebelius' testimony. "This is the largest of the many budget gimmicks Democrats used to claim Obamacare would reduce the deficit."
Had your accountant done this, you would have fired him. Firing Obamacare financial wizards is proving more difficult.Certainly Democrats who voted for this health care industry makeover can be trusted on some of their promises, can't they? Remember when Sarah Palin was shouted down for fretting about Obamacare's "death panels," and a nervous nation was assured such a thing was removed from the legislation? The New York Times broke the news in December that
what was erased from the bill will be reinstituted by bureaucratic fiat. Medicare will "pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment," Times reporter Robert Pear wrote.
Why worry just because the government can save money denying you surgery in your old age? A panel of smart-guy bureaucrats pressuring doctors, whose paychecks they can cancel, certainly knows better, don't they? Would a government-regulated doctor put his financial well-being above your well-being?This is shaping up to be a lot of broken promises, isn't it? As the singer once promised,
"You ain't seen nothin' yet." But before we further itemize Obamacare's horrors, ask yourself, "Why did the Democratic-controlled Congress rush this 2,700-page bill into law before even supporters digested its contents?"
Here's a wild guess:
If people had known the whole story, the outrage probably would have killed it.
At least we were promised that the more we got to know about Obamacare the more we would like it. Well, not quite.
"Contrary to the confident predictions of some, the contents of this law are even worse than anyone expected," Republicans House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote recently.
Voters were so unfavorably impressed they threw out 35 congressional Democrats who voted for it, and the new House of Representatives voted to repeal it by a greater margin than had voted to pass it only a year before. Polls say the public likes Obamacare even less today. When it was passed, only 39 percent of Americans supported it; 37 percent do now, according to a CNN poll. Significantly more, 59 percent opposed it then, and still do.
John and Mary Doe weren't the only ones to sniff a skunk.
More than 1,000 unions, companies and nonprofits requested, and were given, waivers so they don't have to immediately abide by Obamacare provisions, exempting 2.6 million people. Yes, those are the same provisions we were told that we would find so likeable.That raises another repulsive feature of this megalaw: It set up the federal government as dispenser of special treatment. If there's something painful, costly or unworkable about Obamacare, feel free to go hat in hand to one of the 159 new friendly, faceless bureaucracies created by the law and plead, beg or whine to see if they will give you a waiver, too.
The law empowers unelected, unaccountable strangers to lord it over those who pay their salaries, and to do so utterly arbitrarily because the law says the newly elevated bureaucratic lords will determine the limits to their lording. You get to beg, plead and whine.
Maybe if you're a big campaign contributor, like some of those unions, you too can be exempted from an Obamacare mandate. For a while. Maybe until the next election cycle.
Back to broken promises. Obamacare promised that while reducing costs it would make taxpayer-financed Medicaid available to millions more Americans, who incidentally don't all look like the poor people for whom this welfare version of health care originally was intended in the 1960s. How can the federal government do more of that without increasing costs? Largely
by forcing the 50 states to pick up the tab. You may have heard the squealing emanating from Sacramento, Albany and other statehouses where this provision is a large part of their budget deficits.But doesn't Obamacare extend coverage to millions who went without?
Sure. Whether they want it or not. And whether they want to pay for it or not. The individual mandate that everyone must buy insurance carries a financial penalty if they don't. It's not clear whether the penalty is a tax or a fine, but some smart bureaucrat no doubt will decide what to call it.
Then there's the employer mandate, which works with companies the way the individual mandate works with people. Provide coverage or pay a fine, businesses are being told.
That already is affecting another central tenet of Obamacare, that if you liked your present doctor and insurance, you could keep them. A collaborative federal report by Health and Human Services, the Labor Department and the IRS regarding individuals keeping existing health plans showed the "midrange estimate is that
66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013." The government also estimated that 80 percent of small employers, and 69 percent of all plans, would lose their status by 2013.
Other than details like that, Obamacare's promise was sterling.
How's all this going over with doctors?
"You'll discover a not-so-subtle campaign to dramatically reshape the doctor-patient relationship. From compensation to autonomy, Obamacare represents something of a war on doctors," write medical doctors Jason Fodeman, formerly a fellow with the Heritage Foundation, and David Gratzer, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Remember the promise to reduce costs? It turns out Obamacare won't. Even though significant expenditures don't start for four years, and revenue will be collected for all 10 years,
the Congressional Budget Office now says that, over the next decade, Obamacare will cost $2.6 trillion and increase the federal deficit. Some savings."Where's that money going to come from," you may ask. The Congressional Budget Office answers:
The law imposes $569 billion in new taxes.
At least Democrats must have been right about Obamacare creating lots of new jobs, right? In a word, no.
The Congressional Budget Office reported to Congress that
Obamacare will cost America about 800,000 full-time jobs. Small businesses can hardly be blamed for reluctance to hire new employees, considering Obamacare's increased insurance premiums, mandates and regulations."Unlike the remedy we were promised,
Obamacare has done nothing to improve the quality of health care in our country, and has already done significant damage to the economy," says Rep. Renee Ellmers, who besides representing a North Carolina congressional district is a nurse of 20 years, wife of a surgeon and owner of a wound clinic. Ah, but what would she know compared to smart-guy bureaucrats and political wizards?
This only will get worse, unless in 2012 Democrats lose control of the Senate and White House, or the Supreme Court agrees with a majority of states who have sued, arguing that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
If that happens, the nation can turn to a full array of reasonable, private-sector solutions that can be unleashed by the government relinquishing its control.Otherwise, these symptoms will be aggravated as even more intrusive government diktats are rolled out. That's a promise.
Op-ed
