> Obamacare is a train wreck of epic proportions. It will ruin the economy, drive individuals into full time part time status as employees, harm small businesses, and make Americans more and more dependent on the federal government as slaves to the entitlement state while ballooning our national debt.
But it is all free, right?
Really? You don’t say.
I am torn between believing that people who voted for this law were not intelligent enough to realize this was inevitable, or believing that people who voted for this law *knew* this would happen and are hoping to leverage it into a single payer system that will completely destroy U.S. healthcare. Tough call.
(h/t [Right Coast](http://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2013/04/baucus-warns-of-huge-train-wreck-enacting-obamacare-provisions-the-hills-healthwatch.html))
> Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Monday that she did not anticipate how complicated implementing the president’s signature healthcare law would be.
Seriously? Are you kidding me? It is for reasons like this that the law should not have been passed in the first place. What a disaster.
Dan Mitchell, Thomas Sowell, and the CEO of Wholefoods all agree: *fascism.*
Why does this still surprise people? Of course businesses were going to have to do this in order to continue to stay open. The “outrage” associated with businesses being forced into these decisions is mind-boggling.
> Yesterday, a Las Vegas business owner fired 22 of his 144 employees, phoning in anonymously to a local radio host and explaining how the decision was directly caused by President Obama’s reelection.
As expected, ObamaCare starts to crush business growth.
There is a ton of misinformation about Mitt Romney’s approach to pre-existing conditions floating around. This misinformation is usually coupled with stories of people saying “without Obamacare I could never get health insurance.” Here is how Governor Romney’s plan would actually work[^fn1]:
> Romney’s plan would fix this and extend to the entire health system, including the individual market, the HIPAA protections that work well today in the group market. This would allow millions of people to move seamlessly from group to individual coverage, and back again, so long as they stay continuously insured. That alone will dramatically reduce gaps in coverage that are so frequent today.
It would also help those people who currently do not have insurance:
> First, regarding the uninsured, it would be a relatively straightforward policy to allow anyone who didn’t have continuous coverage to join insurance without penalty at the initiation of this program. Providing this kind of “open enrollment” option would be a powerful mechanism for reducing the ranks of the uninsured.
Finally, and most importantly the cost of healthcare:
> Of course, the real problem here is that health care is far too expensive, as Romney argued in the debate. The source of this problem is misguided federal tax and entitlement policies that discourage sensible economizing in the health sector. Instead of fixing these flaws, Obamacare doubles down on the current system by expanding enrollment into the existing entitlement structure.
In summary, Governor Romney’s approach would actually address the problems that Obamacare was allegedly trying to solve, without crushing the US economy and harming small businesses in the process.
[^fn1]: This explanation comes from James C. Capretta writing for National Review.
Vice President Biden just made something up? Shocking.
Of course this is what is going to happen. The next 4 years are going to be a real eye-opener for people.
James C. Capretta nails it in two paragraphs:
> Instead of reforming these entitlements while trying to broaden insurance coverage, Obamacare leaves the current behemoth in place and then piles massive new commitments on top of it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law will entitle at least 30 million people to expensive new health-insurance subsidies, and that number could easily rise by 20 million or more if employers dump their workers at moderately higher rates than the CBO assumes. The new spending for these commitments will grow at a rate of about 8 percent per year from 2016 through 2022, pushing the new entitlement’s cost at the end of the ten-year projection period to $250 billion a year. Over the long run, this new spending commitment will add trillions to the government’s unfunded liabilities.
> The law’s proponents argue that these commitments are fully paid for with spending cuts and taxes. This is false. A primary source of funding is the reimbursement cuts in the Medicare program that are so plainly unrealistic that the chief actuary has said repeatedly they can’t be relied upon to finance the bill. And the tax hikes in Obamacare are reason enough for conservative opposition: Totaling $800 billion over a decade, these taxes will lessen growth by reducing investment and the labor supply, and will reintroduce “bracket creep,” a way to push tax collection higher and higher with each passing year. The CBO estimates that Obamacare will push up federal tax collection by more than 1 percent of GDP by 2035, largely because the taxes will apply to more and more middle-class Americans.
Unfortunately, it is tough to explain that in a 30 second campaign spot. Hopefully, over the next few weeks, Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan can at least make a few attempts at articulating it.
Nothing like taxing the sale of medical devices. Of course, President Obama is just so much “likable” than Governor Romney, so we might as well give him 4 more years to drive the economy into the ground.
Marco Arment uses anecdotal evidence as a lead in to his predictions as to the future of America’s healthcare system. I hope that we will soon be able to add “healthcare” to the list of wrong predictions he has made recently[^fn1].
I can provide a counter anecdote to the one Mr. Arment cites: I believe that if Obamacare was in place 14 years ago, my mother might not be alive today. Furthermore, if the so-called *public option* or *universal payer* system was in place, my mother almost certainly would not be alive. The medical system, pre-Obamacare, allowed her to have surgery only a few days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. That type of turn around is [far below the mean wait time in places like Canada that have a universal payer system](http://www.fraserinstitute.org/publicationdisplay.aspx?id=2147484002). If my mother would have had to wait 14 weeks to get her surgery, she probably would not have survived.
The obvious response to that anecdote is that my mother must have “good” health insurance. That is true. It is not, however, some kind of “magical” health insurance that is impossible to receive. It is the health insurance that public school teachers get in the state of Maine.
[^fn1]: The list includes Textmate 2 post-open-source and whether or not [App.net](http://alpha.app.net) would get funded. Neither one of these has the potential to impact lives as much as the *charliefoxtrot* that is Obamacare.
> There are two tiers of men with advanced prostate cancer in Ontario: Those who get access to a remarkable drug through private insurance, and those who get a death sentence.
> The grim news is often delivered at the London Regional Cancer Program to men whose shoulders sag and jaws drop when told Ontario’s Health Ministry has for 15 months refused to pay for a medication covered by every other Canadian province.
> “There’s shock, fury and dismay,” said oncologist Kylea Potvin. “Everyone thinks we have this wonderful universal health care system, but this is absolutely not the case. We’ve increasingly become a two-tier health care system where if you have money, you have access.”
This is exactly why I have always been against Obamacare and other attempts at socialized medicine. Imagine the class warfare when those who can not afford to get additional health insurance *on top* of their government provided insurance are handed down a death sentence. Furthermore, imagine having to go to the equivalent of a healthcare “DMV” to get approval to have a certain procedure or to have medicine paid for. I want everyone to have access to the medical care they need to survive, but socialized medicine is not the way to do it.
> The average annual salary of a health benefits exchange employee would exceed $125,000 under the plan.
Well that makes sense. It will take a lot of work for these particular bureaucrats to determine what procedures people will actually be able to get.
(via [Dan Mitchell](http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/in-addition-to-its-many-other-flaws-obamacare-is-becoming-a-racket-for-overpaid-government-bureaucrats/))
> Under the plan, all Massachusetts doctors, hospitals and other providers must register with a new state bureaucracy as a condition of licensure—that is, permission to practice. They’ll be required to track and report their financial performance, price and cost trends, state-sanctioned quality measures, market share and other metrics.
> …
> But Massachusetts takes 360-degree surveillance and converts it into a panopticon prison. An 11-member board known as the Health Policy Commission will use the data to set and enforce rules to ensure that total Massachusetts health spending, public and private, grows no more than projected gross state product through 2017, and 0.5 percentage points lower thereafter. (And Paul Ryan’s Medicare projections are unrealistic?)
> No registered provider is allowed to make “any material change to its operations or governance structure,” the bill says, without the commission’s approval. The commission can also rewrite the terms of provider contracts with insurers and payment levels and methods if they are “deemed to be excessive.”
Of course this is the next step. There is no way the system can support itself unless it exerts more control over the doctors (i.e. the suppliers) prices. It will be interesting to see if Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can explain this to the American people, especially with Governor Romney’s involvement in setting up the Massachusetts law looming in the background.