How much else could go wrong with one piece of legislation? The following points try to answer that question:
1) The Ohio Department of Insurance recently predicted that Ohio residents will see their individual policy health insurance rates increase 88% in 2014 because of Obama Care. Lt. Governor Mary Taylor recently stated in Forbes magazine that, “We have warned of these increases. Consumers will have fewer choices and pay much higher premiums for their health insurance starting in 2014.”
Higher cost, less variety and choices. Does not get much worse than that.
2) A Heritage Foundation analysis that was posted on its website on June 3, 2013 pointed out how Obama Care will decimate Medicare and hurry its demise. First, recall from a previous post that Medicare’s Part A trust fund is expected to be bankrupt by 2026 and the overall program has a long-term unfunded obligation of more than $35 trillion.
But under Obama Care, Medicare’s budget is going to be slashed by over $700 billion in the next ten years, budget resources that will be redirected to Obama Care’s needs and budget. Thus, Medicare’s financial status gets much worse, not better under Obama Care.
Heritage quotes a study by the Congressional Budget Office which concluded these budget cuts will hit health care providers such as hospitals, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, and hospices. The Medicare trustees predict that if Congress allows these cuts to go into effect, 15% of Medicare providers would go in the red by 2019, 25% by 2030, and 40% by 2050.
And two things are likely to happen, neither of them good, if this red ink scenarios come to past: “Providers could not sustain continuing negative margins and would have to withdraw from serving Medicare beneficiaries or (if total facility margins remained positive) shift substantial portions of Medicare costs to their non-Medicare, non-Medicaid payers.” In other words, many senior citizens could lose access to their medical care or costs could go up for everyone, the exact opposite of what Obama Care was supposed to do.
3) A June 2, 2013 article from The Hill reported that there are at least two major sets of lawsuits still pending against Obama Care’s tenets:
- One set of lawsuits accuses the Internal Revenue Service of illegally implementing new subsidies to help people buy insurance that is in conflict with the actual text of the legislation.
- Additionally, more than 60 lawsuits have been filed challenging the law’s mandate for health plans to cover birth control.
4) The Wegman’s supermarket chain has historically had a very good health insurance program for its part time workers. It was a voluntary program, offered to any employee who worked at least 20 hours a week. However, the chain recently announced that it would be discontinuing the program because of the requirements of Obama Care, the additional costs imposed on them would be too much.
Thus, another group of Americans see that Obama broke his promise when he vowed that if you like your health insurance you can keep it under the Obama Care legislation. Not so much at Wegman’s and hundreds of other companies across the country.
5) One of the attributes of Obama Care is that if an American was not financially well off, they could qualify for Federal tax subsidies to help pay for health care coverage. The process was that IRS tax records would be electronically and automatically correlated with a person’s application for financial help and if they fell below certain income thresholds, they would get government assistance.
There was a major problem with this process when it was formulated. Let’s say that a person made $100,000 a year and correctly filed that amount on their tax return. However, since they filed that return, they lost their job and their income went to zero. The IRS/Obama Care process would have denied them financial assistance despite their zero income level since the benchmark was when they were earning $100,000 a year.
Reverse the process. Let’s assume a person was unemployed and had zero income, an amount they correctly filed with their IRS tax return. However, soon after they filed that return, they got a job paying $100,000 a year. Thus, if they filed for Federal financial assistance, they would qualify because in the eyes of Obama Care, they had zero income.
Insanity. Apparently, tax filing timing, not true need, would drive the eligibility of financial assistance. Additionally, this process insanely only looks at recent income levels, not wealth levels.
Consider this extreme example. Assume that Warren Buffet turned all of his assets into physical cash, stuck in in a giant safety deposit box and decided not to work for a year. Under Obama Care, he would qualify for Federal assistance because he had a zero income level, DESPITE the fact that he had billions of dollars in his possession in a safety deposit box. Idiotic planning and reasoning on the part of Obama Care’s writers.
But the situation is far worse than this lunacy. Why? This week we found out that the Federal government has no idea or data processing infrastructure in place to make this correlation between historical tax records and a person’s Obama Care application for financial assistance.
The Obama administration has finally and openly admitted that the Federal government lacks the ability to verify if people are telling the truth about needing ObamaCare-related tax subsidies. This process was supposed to make the overall Obama Care legislation financially viable since it was supposed to be partially paid for by curtailing widespread waste, fraud and abuse. Now, this failed assumption and process potentially makes waste, fraud and abuse even more prevalent and easier.
And to add insult to injury, the administration plans to still go ahead with the roll out despite absolutely NO income checks to protect taxpayer wealth.
Guess what? Four full days of posts into the Obama Care train wreck and we are still not done documenting all of the bad things that are happening and will happen as a result of this legislation. More to follow tomorrow.
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