By Joe Angione
You’re not getting it from Washington politicians…not from Congress…not from the president or from anyone in the White House; not from Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Libertarians, independents, and certainly not from the media. Every one of them has a self-serving agenda to follow and a particular axe to grind that has almost nothing to do with improving the health of the American public.
The nation’s health-care needs are not reflected in the Affordable Care Act. The original, honest premise behind healthcare reform was to extend health insurance protection to those who couldn’t get it due to having pre-existing medical conditions, to extend health care coverage to those too poor to afford it, and also to eliminate lifetime caps on medical spending for people burdened with incurable, life-threatening conditions. Period…this is the end of the valid reasons for healthcare reform.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is dishonestly designed to give the federal government full control of accessibility to healthcare for everyone—the healthy, the sick, the wealthy, the young and the old. It does almost nothing to distinguish between the medical requirements of each of these groups in order to arrive at insurance plans tailored to their individual situations and priced affordably according to their ability to pay.
On the contrary, the ACA’s goal is to offer a “one-size-fits-all” health plan for all people regardless of age, gender, physical condition or need. It makes things like expensive maternity and pediatric care mandatory for everyone, including men, those beyond their child-bearing years, and those not intending to have children. It forces employers regardless of religious beliefs to pay for contraceptive and abortifacient products and services through their employee health plans.
The ACA seeks to build for each person a “soaring health insurance bill” filled with benefits that are unnecessary for most people in order to offset the high costs insurance companies must bear to cover the very sick and the elderly.
The Affordable Care Act claims it will subsidize insurance costs for low or no-income Americans. But it has no mechanisms to “means-test” individuals to determine who are eligible to receive these subsidies…nor does ACA appear to want to be involved in means-testing.
Hidden in all this is the Obama administration’s desire to extract huge insurance premiums from the young and the wealthy to underwrite the insurance expenses of the nation’s growing class of “entitlement-addicted” citizens and undocumented aliens. In regard to Obamacare’s fleecing of the young and healthy, this amounts to intergenerational theft.
There aren’t 40 million Americans in need of health insurance assistance. When you subtract the 12 to 14 million illegal aliens—who shouldn’t be eligible– from this fictional total, and then take out the young, up to 26 years old, who can be included on their parents’ insurance plans, and also subtract the millions of other young people who are healthy and well off, and can afford their own health insurance, you find that those truly in need of government-provided health insurance shrinks to less than 20 million.
A $300 annual federal income-tax surcharge would cover all the uninsured. Why should we permit Obamacare to deliver a broadly destructive version of health care reform? Why should the objective of this reform be to cancel the insurance plans of tens of millions of Americans, and ruin the nation’s health insurance industry? Why should we opt for such devastating financial upheaval when a modest federal income-tax surcharge could pay for expanding health insurance to every citizen currently without it?
Today, there are 122 million Americans who file and pay federal income tax. An annual levy of $300 placed on each–$500 for spouses filing jointly–would yield about $35 billion each year to fund health insurance for the truly needy. This vast sum distributed across those who can’t afford any insurance premiums, and provided to those who need only some assistance in paying premiums, would accommodate every U.S. citizen currently without health coverage.
In this way, no one now able to afford health insurance purchased on the individual marketplace would have to give it up in favor of the overblown, overly expensive health plans created by Obama’s bureaucrats. Also, healthy, young people would not have to pay extra to cover older, sick people.
Obamacare succeeds or fails depending on the number of young, healthy individuals who enroll in the plans offered through the system. These plans will carry monthly premiums far exceeding those now available to the young on the individual marketplace. Any intelligent young person faced with the high costs of Obamacare is very likely not to buy in, but instead pay the small tax penalty for remaining uninsured. They’re not rich, many are recent college graduates and very often unemployed. The idea of paying extraordinarily high premiums to extend health insurance to the old, the sick and the poor just doesn’t sit well with young people. Besides this, those under the age of 26 can side-step the entire issue by remaining on their parents’ insurance plans.
The more I discuss health insurance with today’s young people, the more I learn that most of those who follow current political events in America won’t yield to the whims of a socialist dictator. They go on to tell me that most of their friends pay no attention to the main issues involved in health-care reform, and have no interest in what Obamacare demands of them.
Obamacare carries the seeds of its own destruction. It violates the first rule of business which is to remain in business. One of the key provisions of Obama’s Affordable Care Act is that no one can be denied health insurance, which means that if you’re willing to pay a modest tax penalty for not carrying insurance, you don’t have to purchase it until you actually need it…until you become sick or injured.
Also Obamacare prevents health insurers from charging more to cover the sick or injured than they charge a healthy individual. The result is that premiums won’t cover benefits, and insurers won’t be able to collect premiums before they’re forced to pay out huge claims.
There’s no doubt that, under these rules, health insurers could go bankrupt paying benefits to people with pre-existing conditions. They may not be able to stay in business longer than a year or two under the Affordable Care Act unless a bailout provision, currently written into the ACA, is implemented to keep these insurers afloat. Such a bailout would come right out of taxpayers’ pockets thereby further increasing the total cost of Obamacare in an economy employing the smallest labor force in decades, growing unemployment, and few new jobs that pay a “living wage.”
Obamacare’s “navigators” put us on a crash course for identity theft. To assist people in signing up for Obamacare, the president’s Secretary of Health and Human Services has hired nearly 50,000 so-called marketplace specialists to work with everyone who enrolls using the healthcare.gov. website or its 800-number. These navigators are paid as high as $48 per hour to provide customer service that helps people find a health plan they can afford, and to build total enrollments to the level where Obamacare can sustain itself.
Unfortunately, navigator candidates were not submitted to background checks. HHS Secretary Sebelius said she can’t guaranty that enrollees “are not giving their personal information to a criminal.” Even the Obamacare website warns users that they have “no reasonable expectation” of protection against identity theft when entering information on the site.
How could HHS fail to put these candidates through a comprehensive background check? After all, the security of the entire nation is at stake. But security was never meant to be an issue in a hiring program that focused on providing well-paid jobs to the heart of President Obama’s voter base: union employees, community organizers, former ACORN members, and other left-wing radicals. In the “Obama-nation,” every new entitlement offers an opportunity to kick money back to the president’s campaign supporters.
Obamacare must be repealed; it can’t be fixed. Trying to repair something as dangerously flawed as Obamacare is like attempting to overhaul a jet engine while flying at 35,000 feet. You risk losing everything, all lives on board, all at once. The president has told the nation he’s sorry about the pathetic, inexcusably flawed rollout of the ACA’s marketplace.gov website…and that he accepts responsibility for this fiasco. He’s also said he’s working with the insurance industry to stop the cancellation of millions of health insurance policies that didn’t meet the excessively stringent insurance standards set for Obamacare.
Not only is it highly unlikely that a real fix can be made to give people back their recent insurance coverage, but it is unconstitutional for the president to by-pass Congress to amend or fix, by executive order, a law enacted by Congress.
From what we’ve seen recently of Washington’s gross mismanagement of health-care reform, it’s clear that our political parties have little, if any, interest in doing what is in the best interests of the American people.
The nature of politics is the accumulation of power… not for the people, but for the parties that control our government. Too often it is used against the people. Obamacare is a gross travesty of reform placed upon us by Democrats. But Republicans can’t escape guilt for it, and how it has been allowed to contaminate the true goals of health-care reform.
Voting against Obamacare in 2010 wasn’t enough…calling for its repeal now is insufficient. Replacement is essential, and Republicans, if they are to survive as a dominant political party, must achieve it quickly.
Republicans say they’ve drafted sound alternatives to Obamacare, but people like Harry Reid in the Senate have blocked them from being brought to a vote on the Senate floor. While this is true, Republicans have failed in their efforts to spread their vision of the health-care reform they believe will truly improve the delivery of medical services to all.
Republicans…Democrats…neither are doing right by health-care reform. What are Americans to do when there is a total disconnect between their needs and the objectives of their political parties?
Villager Joe Angione writes about conservative issues. Read more about www.Conservatively.net