Nobody likes thinking about illness or the expense of illness, it’s inconvenient, scary and unfamiliar. Similarly with Obamacare, the law was largely ignored from its enactment in 2010, until the end of 2013 when its provisions directly impacted us. This was diagnosis Obamacare.
Like an illness, those provisions were a surprise to many of us even though all the words were there, sitting there in print since 2010. We put off addressing it until specific provisions started making it too hard to ignore, the threats of tax penalties, the increased expense of health insurance, new routines of enrolling for health insurance. Suddenly there was a frenzy of activity as if the law hadn’t been in place since 2010. This was the crisis from diagnosis Obamacare.
We needed to do something with the diagnosis. The rude awakening was that what we thought we had wasn’t what we had and that what we had was bad. We addressed it in the ways we felt we needed to for our own lives, trying to sign up for affordable health insurance, choosing plans with a little less coverage and a little more co-insurance payments to make premiums affordable, trying to see if we were eligible for the new entitlement created by the programs for people with incomes within certain amounts. This was the action addressing the crisis from the diagnosis of Obamacare.
We grabbed onto every piece of positive news supplied by public persons, even when those pieces of news were direct lies, irrelevant to our personal experience, or simply promises that things would get better…snake oil, not cures for diagnosis Obamacare, comments and topics of little use in addressing diagnosis Obamacare.
We got over our shock and once “some” health insurance was obtained, lapsed back into our “normal” lives, mostly planning on not thinking about Obamacare until next year.
This is our adaptation to Obamacare. But adaptation is not the same as truly adjusting to and acknowledging the reality of a crisis. Adaptation can be temporary, the temporary addressing of a crisis and slipping back into our pre-crisis way of thinking post-crisis.
In any diagnosis, this often is not possible. Once you’ve received the diagnosis there are changes that you need to make to best live with the diagnosis.
With Obamacare, we as consumers have not yet realized that health insurers are not done hiking premiums and that those premiums are likely to rise again by next benefits season. Even Kathleen Sebelius, the abruptly retired Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services confessed that in February, 2014.
We’ve already been told that because of the plan choices and the expense of various health insurance plans that we’re likely to have millions of people who become ill and need medical treatment and care and find themselves woefully underinsured, facing bankruptcy or the choice of forfeiting medical care because their chosen health insurance plans simply cover too little.
We’re just beginning to connect the dots of reality that the increased payroll tax for all citizens receiving a paycheck, the increased threshold of medical expenses that must be reached to obtain tax relief from 7.5 percent to 10 percent, the failure to impose any limits on what percentage of a person’s pay can be charged for that person to purchase dependent coverage for his/her family, the bottom-heavy focus of lots of choice and “coverage” for non-treatment medicine (preventive checkups) at the expense of improvement of choice and coverage in the event of illness are actually facts that indicate that there is NO return to a normal we were accustomed to before.
This will be the flare-up of the diagnosis of Obamacare, that most consumers will be able to put off thinking about again until next benefits season.
But it is argued here that this adaptation is not good for consumers in an environment where other stakeholders are continuously bargaining, pressuring and finding new ways of charging more to consumers for less and less meaningful coverage in the event of illness.
Politicians are worried about the spin they’re putting on Obamacare for elections, we should be demanding more than the same ignorant recitation of well-familiar arguments from both sides exhibiting little effort, knowledge or intention to help improve some of the worse aspects of Diagnosis Obamacare for consumers.
Everyone’s trying to return to “normal,” consumers eager to not think about Obamacare, the President who still can’t seem to distinguish between healthcare and health insurance in his language and has instead shifted his sarcasm and self-satisfaction to declaring victory that 7 million (maybe) people have enrolled for health insurance, has assumed that they were previously uninsured (maybe), presumes that they will pay for such insurance (maybe), and ignores the tens of millions of uninsured who in fact Obamacare was designed to help obtain health insurance.
Congress has not said anything new on either side in months, too lazy and too smug to listen to voters who are the ones experiencing the law leading to such idiotic comments as the one by Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on April 1, 2014, who was asked by Chuck Todd concerning specific Obamacare problems, “What is one? You don’t have one that’s on your radar screen?” and answered, “That comes to mind immediately? No, nothing glaring.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS8bslP7Q5s) and has Republicans peddling some vague “replacement” plan for the law.
Insurance companies are warning of even higher rates and healthcare providers show no signs of charging anything but more for every service they provide.
In other words, consumers should be demanding something more from the other stakeholders, which really means that we have to accept the reality of Obamacare rather than adapt to it for a short period of time in order to cogently work towards modifications and election of individuals and support of organizations that promote meaningful changes to Obamacare that will address some of the substantial risks to us both physically and financially from this law.
