Send Us Hatemail ! mailbag@conservativecave.com
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Obamacare’s reorganization of the U.S. health care system is slated to go on-line on January 1, 2014. That’s when the law’s key provisions go into effect: its individual mandate; its rules requiring higher premiums for young people; and its expansion of insurance coverage through Medicaid and the law’s subsidized private insurance exchanges. Quote: Chao said that he’d once held high hopes that the exchanges would run smoothly from the beginning, but that those hopes had been dashed. “The time for debating about the size of the text on the screen, or the color, or is it a world-class user experience, that’s what we used to talk about two years ago,†said Chao. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.†Quote: The real problem is that the blizzard of mandates and regulations that accompany Obamacare’s exchanges will force many people to buy far costlier insurance than they’ve had to in the past. “In some markets,†said Aetna’s CEO, Mark Bertolini, insurance premiums could increase “as high as 100 percent. And we’ve done all that math. We’ve shared it with all the regulators. We’ve shared it with all the people in Washington that need to see it. And I think it’s a big concern.†Privately and publicly, most of Bertolini’s peers at UnitedHealth, WellPoint, Humana, and Cigna have said the same thing. What will cause the rate shock? A number of things. First, Obamacare forces young people to pay far more for health insurance, in order to mildly subsidize premiums for those in their early 60s, using a provision called “community rating.†Second, the law forces insurance plans to have a higher “minimum actuarial value,†which makes plans more financially generous but also more expensive. Third, the law’s famous “guaranteed issue†provision forces insurers to take all comers, even if they are already sick: a great deal for the sick, but not for the healthy. Fourth, the law gives HHS the power to force insurance plans to contain all sorts of extra benefits that customers wouldn’t otherwise pay for, driving up the cost of those plans. Fifth, the law contains an utterly nonsensical premium tax that insurers will be forced to pay, and pass on to their customers in the form of higher premiums. It also contains taxes on pharmaceuticals and medical devices that will also be passed on in the form of higher premiums. Quote: Each of these cost-increasing provisions of Obamacare is harmful because they make health insurance less affordable to the middle class, while also driving up the cost of subsidizing insurance on the exchanges: forcing the government to extract even more money from taxpayers.
