ObamadoesnotCare
...About Americans...just his legacy, which is an EPIC failure.
Obama's statement featured the usual lies and spin that were habitual during his presidency, but it's also important to realize that Obamacare broke a lot of key promises that Obama made on the campaign trail and throughout his presidency. Here are seven of them:
1. "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." This was such an egregious lie that even left-wing PolitiFact dubbed it as the "Lie of the Year" in 2013: (emphasis bolded)
The Affordable Care Act tried to allow existing health plans to continue under a complicated process called "grandfathering," which basically said insurance companies could keep selling plans if they followed certain rules.
The problem for insurers was that the Obamacare rules were strict. If the plans deviated even a little, they would lose their grandfathered status. In practice, that meant insurers canceled plans that didn’t meet new standards.
Obama’s team seemed to understand that likelihood. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the grandfathering rules in June 2010 and acknowledged that some plans would go away. Yet Obama repeated "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" when seeking re-election last year.
In other words, Obamacare's mandates and regulations caused insurance plans to cover benefits that a lot of people didn't want or need, contributing to the rise in premiums while pushing people off their insurance and onto Medicaid or the nightmare that is the Obamacare exchanges.
2. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Just like his broken promise about being able to keep their insurance plans, this was a lie that Obama repeated numerous times:
It goes without saying that when people lose their insurance, they likely lose their doctor as well. Even the Obamacare website scrubbed any reference to the lie about being able to keep your doctor.
3. Obama promised repeatedly that premiums would decline by $2,500 per year under Obamacare.
The opposite has happened, as premiums have skyrocketed under Obamacare.
4. Obama claimed that Obamacare wouldn't worsen the deficit. "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits," Obama lied in his 2009 State of the Union address.
The Daily Wire has previously reported that Obamacare will "result in trillion-dollar deficits in seven years' time" and that the "Congressional Budget Office warned that the debt could be as high as $30 trillion by 2030, with Obamacare being one of the driving factors behind that increase."
5. Obama pledged not to raise taxes on middle class families. "I can make a firm pledge," Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008. "Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."
Obamacare easily broke this pledge; in 2014 Americans for Tax Reform noted that these five Obamacare taxes would harm the middle class the most:
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Putting a cap of $2,500 on Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs).
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Increasing the tax-deductible threshold for high medical costs from 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income to 10 percent of adjusted gross income.
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Preventing Americans from using money saved in FSAs or Health-Savings Accounts (HSAs) toward "over-the-counter medicines."
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The individual mandate.
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A ten percent tax on using indoor tanning services.
6. Obamacare was sold as a plan to reduce emergency room visits. PolitiFact examined Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price's statement that the American people were told that Obamacare would reduce emergency room visits, but Obamacare "did just the opposite." The leftist "fact-checker" quoted Obama asserting at a 2009 town hall that "one of the areas where we can potentially see some saving is" through "reducing the amount of emergency room care." A more definitive statement from Obama saying that emergency room visits would decline under Obamacare came from a September 2010 question and answer session:
And by the way, that should save us all a lot of money. I mean, one of the toughest things about this health care debate was--and sometimes I fault myself for not having been able to make the case more clearly to the country--we spend--each of us who have health insurance spend about a thousand dollars of our premiums on somebody else's care.
What happens is, you don't have health insurance, you go to the emergency room. You weren't getting a checkup; something that might have been curable with some antibiotics isn't caught. By the time you get to the hospital, it's much more expensive. The hospital cares for you because doctors and nurses, they don't want to just turn somebody away. But they've got to figure out how do they keep their doors open if they're treating all these people coming into the emergency room.
Well, what they do is they essentially pass on those costs in the form of higher premiums to the people who do have health insurance. And so we are already providing these subsidies, but it's the most inefficient possible subsidy we could provide. We're a lot better off if we are making sure that everybody is getting preventive care, we're encouraging wellness programs where people have access to doctors up front.
And that's why we feel pretty confident that over the long term, as a consequence of the Affordable Care Act, premiums are going to be lower than they would be otherwise; health care costs overall are going to be lower than they would be otherwise. And that means, by the way, that the deficit is going to be lower than it would be otherwise.
Even PolitiFact had to admit that there was no evidence that Obamacare reduced emergency room visits; studies and surveys clearly showed either little change or an increase in emergency room visits under Obamacare:
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May 2015: A survey of more than 2,000 emergency-room physicians by the American College of Emergency Physicians asked whether the volume of patients in their emergency room had dropped or risen after the law took effect. The results: 28 percent said it had "increased greatly" and 47 percent said it had "increased slightly." Combined, that means three-quarters of emergency room doctors saw an increase.
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February 2016: A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at the change in emergency room use between 2013 (which was largely before the law) and 2014 (which was largely after the law took effect). "ER use overall has not changed significantly after the first full year of ACA implementation," the report concludes.
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August 2016: A study in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine looked at emergency room use in Illinois by adults between 2011 and 2015, separating out patterns of visits before and after the law took effect. The study found that emergency room visits in the state "increased after ACA health insurance expansion. ... A large post-ACA increase in Medicaid visits and a modest increase in privately insured visits outpaced a large reduction in (emergency room) visits by uninsured patients."
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PolitiFact rated Price's statement as "Mostly True" because he "overstated the case slightly, but he's basically correct," which makes no sense – if "he's basically correct," then Price should have received a "True" rating.
7. Obamacare's exchanges were sold as being a competitive marketplace. "We'll do this by creating a new insurance exchange — a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at a competitive price," Obama said in September 2009. "Insurance companies will have an incentive to participate in this exchange because it lets them compete for millions of new customers."
But as the Daily Wire has previously written:
Seven states have only one insurer providing insurance through Obamacare due to the fact that major insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare and Aetna are all leaving the exchanges because of unsustainability. As a result, there has been less competition throughout the Obamacare exchanges, contributing to the rise of premiums and deductibles and less consumer choice.
On the seventh anniversary on Obamacare, remember that these broken promises are a reflection of the disaster that the law has brought to the healthcare sector and the lives of millions of Americans. It also further underscores the need for full repeal; anything less would be failure.
Universal Health Care Won’t Work — Witness Medicare
They’re back. The single-payer advocates are out in full force, again, calling for universal health insurance for all Americans. This time they’re backed by a bipartisan coalition including Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Some of the current proposals are as coercive as Hillary Clinton’s infamous national health plan. The new push carries the same message, but more “moderate” messengers deliver it.
At first glance, many Americans might find the idea of single-payer health insurance appealing, given current economic conditions and high health insurance costs. However, before we accept such a drastic shift in national health policy, we should examine how single-payer health insurance could affect all individuals’ health care costs, choices and privacy.
If history is any indication, any single-payer initiative will end up costing much more than advocates claim. That, in turn, will lead to higher taxes and/or rationing under which the government will determine which medical treatments will and will not be covered. How do we know this will happen? Because single-payer health care has already been empirically tested on seniors in the United States. Many people may not realize it, but the Medicare program is one of the largest single payers of health care in the U.S. and in the world. An examination of Medicare’s 38-year-old track record provides evidence of what happens when the government controls the financing of health services for millions of U.S. citizens. Consider the following facts.
When Medicare was debated in 1965 (the year it was signed into law), business and taxpayer groups were concerned that program expenditures might grow out of control. However, single-payer advocates assured them that all seniors could easily be covered under Medicare with only a small increase in workers’ payroll taxes. The federal government’s lead actuary in 1965 projected that the hospital program (Medicare Part A) would grow to only $9 billion by 1990. The program ended up costing more than $66 billion that year. Just three years after Medicare was passed, a 1968 Tax Foundation study found that public spending on medical care had nearly doubled in the first few years of Medicare. In subsequent decades, Medicare payroll taxes and general taxes have continued to rise to pay for skyrocketing health care costs.
Tom Miller, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, explains the main problems with Medicare (single-payer) financing. “As fiscal pressures mount, the federal government does not ‘negotiate’ with medical providers for lower prices for covered services,” says Miller. “It dictates below-market reimbursements with its near-monopoly power as a purchaser of health care for seniors. The full costs of such price discounts eventually reduce access to quality care and hold health care markets hostage to political exploitation.”
Before Medicare was passed, seniors were promised that the program would not interfere with their choice of insurance. However, existing rules force most seniors to rely on Medicare Part A to pay their hospital bills — even if they can afford to pay for private insurance. Additionally, today’s seniors and doctors must abide by more than 100,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations dictating what types of services are covered or not under the program.
Currently, many Americans choose to pay privately for health services to maintain their medical privacy. However, a single-payer health plan would eliminate that option and all citizens would be forced to give up their ability to maintain a confidential doctor-patient relationship. Just look at what has happened with Medicare.
Under Medicare rules established in 1999, patients receiving home health care are required to divulge personal medical, sexual, and emotional information. Government contractors — mainly home health nurses — are directed to record such things as whether a senior has expressed “depressed feelings” or has used “excessive profanity.” If seniors refuse to share medical and lifestyle information, their health care workers are required to act as proxies. This means total strangers will be permitted to speak for seniors.
Medicare officials stress that the government protects patients’ privacy. However, the General Accounting Office reported to Congress several years ago that at five of 12 Medicare contractors’ sites, auditors were able to penetrate security and obtain sensitive Medicare information. At a time when citizens are concerned about high health care costs, fewer choices and loss of medical privacy, a single-payer health plan could exacerbate these concerns. Given our empirical evidence from the single-payer Medicare program, a single-payer health insurance program for Americans of all ages would most definitely lead to increased costs, reduced choices and less medical privacy for everyone. These are warning signs that no American — including the moderates pushing universal health care — can afford to ignore.
Things The Mainstream Media Won't Tell You
No, Repealing Obamacare Won't Kill People (And It Hasn't Saved Lives Either)https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/03/14/no-repealing-obamacare-is-not-going-to-lead-to-people-dying-and-it-hasnt-saved-lives-either-n2297369
Mnuchin on Fannie And Freddie Funds Used to Pay for ObamaCare: It's True
ObamaCare gets outsourced amid unemployment crisis
http://nypost.com/2014/01/18/obamacare-gets-outsourced-amid-unemployment-crisis/
Will Repealing Obamacare Kill People? Obamacare has saved ZERO lives!
400,000 Citizens To Lose Health Insurance (Again) Because Of Obamacare Co-Op Failures
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gracemarieturner/2015/10/10/400000-citizens-to-lose-health-insurance-again-because-of-obamacare-co-op-failures/#512d8d0f512d
FLASHBACK: Obamacare Architect: ACA Designed To Implode, Destroy Insurance Companies
http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/20/flashback-obamacare-architect-aca-designed-to-implode-destroy-insurance-companies/
Obama Lied, People Died: Mortality Rate INCREASES Under ObamaCare
http://www.dailywire.com/news/15801/obama-lied-people-died-mortality-rate-increases-john-nolte
Beware Of False Claims That Obamacare Repeal Will Kill Thousands Of Americans
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2017/01/30/beware-of-false-claims-that-obamacare-repeal-will-kill-thousands-of-americans-part-i/#17f3702517f3
Death by Obamacare: ‘Reform’ reams cancer patients
http://nypost.com/2013/11/12/death-by-obamacare-reform-reams-cancer-patients/
Under Obamacare, Death Rates Rise and Life Expectancy Falls in 2015
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/hans-bader/under-obamacare-death-rates-rise-and-life-expectancy-falls-2015
ObamaCare in 'death spiral,' Aetna CEO says
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/16/obamacare-in-death-spiral-aetna-ceo-says.html
New Evidence: Obamacare Is Not Saving Lives
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/12/11/new-evidence-obamacare-is-not-saving-lives/#7d3c704f7d3c
Woman Dies After Obamacare Delayed Life-Saving Cancer Treatment
http://thepoliticalinsider.com/woman-dies-after-obamacare-delayed/#ixzz4gVKWns7n
ObamaCare Killed My Sister
http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/02/10/column-obamacare-killed-my-sister
First Rise in U.S. Death Rate in Years Surprises Experts. Wasn’t Obamacare supposed to make things better, not worse?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/health/american-death-rate-rises-for-first-time-in-a-decade.html
More Americans gain health coverage, but many can’t afford to use it. Tens of thousands die needlessly as a result.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2015/september/more-americans-gain-health-coverage-but-many-can%E2%80%99t-afford-to-use-it-doctors-grou
ObamaCare’s dangerous wait lines
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/healthcare/308738-obamacares-dangerous-wait-lines
Aloha: Hawaii sends its Obamacare exchange to the death panel
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/07/aloha-hawaii-sends-its-obamacare-exchange-to-the-death-panel/
Liberal Activist: ‘Thousands of People Will Die Every Year’ Under Obamacare
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/liberal-activist-thousands-people-will-die-every-year-under-obamacare
The devastating truth behind Obamacare
https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/the-devastating-truth-behind-obamacare/
Obamacare Architect Says Society Would Be Better Off If People Died At 75
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-09-24/obamacare-architect-says-society-would-be-better-if-people-only-lived-age-75
Forbes: Obamacare's Low-Cost Co-ops Going Bankrupt
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obamacare-co-ops-bankrupt-forbes/2015/02/19/id/625670/
More than half of Obamacare co-ops fail
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/3/more-half-obamacare-co-ops-go-belly/
Obamacare Implosion: Last Major Healthcare Provider Pulls Out Of Iowa Leaving No Options In 2018
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-03/obamacare-implosion-iowa-wont-have-healthcare-access-2018-last-major-provider-pulls-
Obamacare bankrupting health insurers, too: Largest insurer loses $1 billion a year, says it's going to drop coverage to save itself from bankruptcy
http://www.naturalnews.com/053811_Obamacare_UnitedHealth_bankrupt_health_insurers.html
Republicans Ask Dems: Where's YOUR Plan To Fix Healthcare?
Democrat's Plan Is To Obstruct So That Even More People Suffer And Are Forced To Pay Money They Don't Have For Something They Cannot Even Use, While Pretending They Care When Obamacare Is Hurting The Very People It Was Supposed To Help The Worst.
You’ve got to hand it to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. The guy dubbed the “Obamacare architect” is a viral YouTube sensation. A few months back, he was caught on tape admitting that Obamacare doesn’t provide subsidies for federally-run insurance exchanges; it's now the topic of a new case before the Supreme Court. Today, new video surfaced in which Gruber said that “the stupidity of the American voter” made it important for him and Democrats to hide Obamacare’s true costs from the public. “That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” said Gruber. “But I’d rather have this law than not.” In other words, the ends—imposing Obamacare upon the public—justified the means.
The new Gruber comments come from a panel discussion that he joined on October 17, 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He was joined on the panel by Penn health economist Mark Pauly. Patrick Howley of the Daily Caller was the first journalist to flag Gruber’s remarks, which were unearthed by Rich Weinstein.
In fairness to Gruber, American voters are not the only people whose intelligence he questions; elsewhere in the discussion, he describes New York Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.) as someone who "as far as I can tell, doesn't understand economics" and calls a staffer for Sen. Olympia Snowe (R., Maine)—presumably William Pewen—an "idiot."
Representatives of the Leonard Davis Institute tried to pull the video of Gruber's remarks, but they were too late. Phil Kerpen and others had already clipped them for public consumption.
Obamacare’s opacity was a deliberate strategy
Gruber made an argument that many of Obamacare’s critics have long made, including me. It’s that the law’s complex system of insurance regulation is a way of concealing from voters what Obamacare really is: a huge redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and unhealthy. In the video, Gruber points out that if Democrats had been honest about these facts, and that the law’s individual mandate is in effect a major tax hike, Obamacare would never have passed Congress.
“Mark [Pauly] made a couple of comments that I do want to take issue with, one about transparency in financing and the other is about moving from community rating to risk-rated subsidies. You can’t do it politically. You just literally cannot do it, okay, transparent financing…and also transparent spending.” Gruber said. “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”
UPenn took down the video of Gruber saying deception was crucial to Obamacare's passage http://t.co/GZW3dQ8Wf9pic.twitter.com/Wvy17VvtPX
Gruber also points out that Obamacare’s individual mandate—the provision that requires most Americans to buy government-approved insurance, or pay a fine—was described in the law as a “penalty” instead of as a “tax” in order to hide the mandate’s effects. “I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the [individual] mandate as taxes,” said Gruber. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so [the law is] written to do that.”
To a large degree, the tactic of opacity worked. Not only did Obamacare get passed, but its complex system of cross-subsidies attracted less notice on the Right than did the law’s tax hikes and spending increases. But what progressives figured out—and conservatives are just learning—is that government regulation of health insurance can serve as yet another way to redistribute money from one group to another.
In Louisiana, Obamacare hiked rates for young men by 108%
If you look at the Manhattan Institute’s Obamacare cost map—in which we analyzed how the law’s health insurance regulations affect people of different ages and genders—you’ll see that for most of the country, young people who shop for coverage on their own have far steeper gross insurance costs under the law than they did before.
For example, in Louisiana—home to a hotly contested Senate race between incumbent Mary Landrieu (D.) and Rep. Bill Cassidy (R.)—the underlying cost of insurance increased by 108 percent for 27-year-old men, and 46 percent for 27-year-old women.
This doesn’t count as a tax increase for official purposes. But for the 27-year-old who is now being forced to pay for costlier coverage, it has basically the same effect as a tax. But age-based community rating attracted almost no attention in the run-up to passage of the health care bill.
Repeal age-based community rating
It’s for this reason that I’ve argued that the new Republican Senate majority should repeal age-based community rating, or modify it considerably. Under Obamacare, insurers can only charge their oldest customers three times as much as they charge their youngest ones. Because 64-year-olds consume about six times as much health care as 21-year-olds, this provision has the net effect of jacking up prices for the young.
That is to say, let’s replace what wonks call the “3:1 age band” with a “6:1 age band” or get rid of age bands altogether. That way, young people—the people who’ve been most harmed in the Obama economy—can once again pay a fair price for health insurance. There’s no better way for Republicans to start engaging younger voters—and to take a principled stand against Obamacare’s obfuscations.
UPDATE 1: Keith Hennessey critiques the dishonest pattern of Congress enacting non-transparent methods of financing health care subsidies. Richard Weir of the Boston Herald reached out to Gruber, but Gruber repeatedly replied "I have no comment."
UPDATE 2: After 24 hours, and presumably some conversations with PR types, Gruber came out of hiding and attempted to explain his remarks on MSNBC's Ronan Farrow Daily:
David Weigel has a piece on the "mild-mannered investment advisor," Rich Weinstein, who has been responsible for highlighting the Gruber videos.
UPDATE 3: Rich Weinstein has released two more Gruber videos, in which the economist boasts of Obamacare's "exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter."