The sky didn’t fall with the beginning of open enrollment for benefits season on the new health exchanges. Few anticipated a drastic negative effect. After all, beyond the politics, the bureaucracy, and the arguing, Obamacare is not revolutionary. But there is a loss of “THE POINT,” in all the rhetoric we’ve heard and we’re hearing.
After all, the basic goal of Obamacare, getting individuals to “have insurance,” is not only old-fashioned in terms of a measure of whether you’ll have sufficient health insurance coverage that will provide you access to needed healthcare services that you can afford if you become sick and require medical treatment, but it ignores the tremendous dependency Obamacare has on our dollars coming in to sustain it, dollars from all individuals and businesses to help support the system of a national clearinghouse for gathering health information by getting people to purchase insurance, which is the most noteworthy feature of Obamacare.
Obamacare promises to be a tremendous and ongoing money pit. The government knows this. We’ve already seen other grabs for money from citizens. For example, the increase in how much your healthcare costs have to be in order to be able to deduct them on your taxes, which goes from 7.5 to 10 percent this year. The imposition of the personal mandate (tax) for those who opt out of health insurance that will increase next year. The increase in payroll taxes, up two percent. Legal changes that your employer will make, such as dropping eligibility for spousal coverage (if spouse has access to other insurance), or the sky-is-the-limit charge for dependent coverage. Some employers will choose to pay penalties for NOT providing health insurance options which can add up to less than what it will cost to maintain an employer provided health insurance program, and still others will choose to dump retirees into a private health exchange like IBM recently did.
Then there are all the changes imposed on healthcare providers who want to take advantage of the financial rewards given by the Federal government to healthcare providers who streamline their business.
But regarding the “carrot” use of money for healthcare providers, as opposed to the “stick” used on consumers in the form of financial penalties, the illogic of Obamacare is that once the “streamlining in order to get dollars,” is completed by healthcare providers, what will they do to keep maximizing profits? The answer is obvious. While the Administration brags that healthcare costs have gone up at one of their slowest rates in recent times, costs are still rising. Once the Federal government stops giving money out to healthcare providers who save money (incentives), those providers will likely raise prices to sustain the extra money they once got from Obamacare. There is no cap on what can be charged by healthcare providers except those participating in the entitlement programs of Veterans Benefits and Medicare.
Obamacare is the newest government bureaucracy that will require a constant flow of money into it to sustain it. That means that unless new, healthy participants are added year after year, that the Federal government will have to get the money for the Obamacare exchanges from somewhere else, eg by charging exchange participant health insurers more, which increases you know will be passed on to individual consumer customers using those insurance companies outside of the exchanges, or perhaps the government will decide to decrease subsidies under Obamacare that this year have exchange participants yippy-aye-oh-yaying about their premiums.
The biggest risk to the old-fashioned approach of Obamacare that “having insurance” is meaningful is the risk to the other key factors that have created our healthcare crisis, access to care and quality of care. Very little is accomplished by Obamacare in this regard.
Many argue persuasively that by adopting this old-fashioned approach Obamacare will negatively impact both access to and quality of care. You’ll read about “thin” options, meaning that the availability of participating providers under your insurance plan may be insufficient for their demand and at the very least will drastically reduce your choice of provider. More people will be pushed into bad insurance policies, those that will NOT sufficiently cover the expense of illness to avoid financial difficulty.
If you look at the HHS website, (search PPACA timeline) it’s almost laughable to read, “October, open enrollment begins, January, coverage begins, March, open enrollment closes, Future, all Americans have access to affordable health care.” Not only is it stupidly simplistic, but since when did having health insurance mean you had affordable CARE?
It is past time for Americans to push for legitimate caps on the costs of healthcare treatments and services instead of believing that health insurance that chases the expenses of healthcare services is the way to go.
Naturally, this idea currently is a non-starter. Republicans will take refuge in their phony ideas of “free market,” phony because they’ve worked long and hard to pass laws that protect them, and because they’d never dream of touching the Veterans entitlement. Democrats would rather squeeze patients than providers, and gradually erode benefits under Social Security and Medicare by selling changes as "opportunities".
But moving forward there is a wall and that wall is that if you can’t afford medical treatment when you need it, then health insurance is a waste of money. There is no point to any of this unless individuals have sufficient coverage to avoid financial ruin by using the health insurance product they pay for to help pay for needed medical treatment. Everything else is a distraction.
Obamacare is law, but it is NOT a done deal. The President himself noted that laws can be changed, repealed, and modified as he berated Republicans. The key driver of our healthcare crisis, the cost of NEEDED medical CARE and TREATMENT is untouched by Obamacare. After all, the healthcare crisis did not arise because people couldn’t afford a checkup (though I anticipate that now that these are mandated in insurance policies that the cost of checkups will rise too.)
