Obamacare may have revealed exactly the opposite of what President Obama attempted to do with the slick passage of, broad reading of, and dishonesty about Obamacare--It may have made it evident that the federal government as it currently malfunctions and as it has continuously under Obama regarding its part in the US health industrial complex might very well be too corrupt, too unaccountable and too self-interested to be in charge.
Where would this leave us? It's not all bad. The first thing is that the states, which have been virtually the laziest, mutest, and most inept paper-pushers devoted to milking the federal government and handing over the reins of insurance governance to the feds, will actually have to step up. Neither the "generous" states like California and New York that capitalized on federal bucks to bolster their expansive agendas, nor the "cheap" states that have left access to healthcare as a non-starter problem for their populations have done right by their voters.
It would also mean that the insurance industry would run amok, which is not so different from what we have now when in 2008, AHIP the insurance lobbyist prepared and achieved its new "partnership" with Obama, a partnership between government and insurers against citizens, and a partnership Paul Ryan has attempted to revive with his blatant obedience to the newly framed "insurance goals" put forth by AHIP tailored to a new administration.
Whereas with Obama, the deal, the government-insurance company team-up was evident in the title of the insurance lobbyist proposal that cleverly incorporated his lying points with the American people, "Health Plans Propose Guaranteed Coverage for Pre-Existing Conditions and Individual Coverage Mandate,” including the magic words of pre-existing conditions that Obama milked for everything it was worth, AHIP has subsequently restyled the same garbage with a new heading for Paul Ryan, "Making Health Care Work for Every American, Solutions to Deliver More Competition, Market Stability and Affordable Coverage."
Both plans significantly promise to save government and incidentally, insurance companies money through the same old tools of narrow networks, excluded coverage for illness, excluded drugs, combined with the other old-time favorites of increased copayments and coinsurance and higher deductibles with two added hits for consumers--a hyperfocus on "prevention" that amounts to forced wellness and penalizing consumers who don't want to be forced to purchase the financial product of health insurance, called the individual mandate under Obamacare and continuous coverage under the Republican plan.
For consumers, both plans also leave public employees, including the very lying Congress people who rant about cutting paid in and therefore misnamed as "entitlement" funds like Medicare, and Medicaid, Social Security and others. If Medicare is an entitlement, what would you call paying for 72 percent of public employee health premiums with tax dollars, a super-entitlement? Let's cut that first. For consumers, the crickets we hear from BOTH Republicans and Democrats regarding their entitlements is telling and indicates again, that our public employees of the federal government may simply be unable to do their jobs as representatives AND greedily keep their own perks.
Then there's the virtually unchecked regulation powers that Obamacare gave to the IRS that actually had the Obama Administration GOING TO COURT to fight to pay MORE OUT in subsidy money based on a nearly fantastical interpretation of Obamacare law.
Then there's the phony numbers…With Obamacare, early on the government stopped counting how much they spent on administering Obamacare, they never counted how many of the "enrollees" in Obamacare had already been insured but suddenly were not BECAUSE of Obamacare, they overestimated the number of people who were uninsured and they underestimated the number of people who were eligible for Medicaid BEFORE expanded Medicaid. The "metrics" were as phony as the survey questions I was asked by my Democratic Party survey that asked essentially, "Would you believe in a candidate who is kind to people or one who is not?" Nonsense.
But make no mistake, Paul Ryan is just like Obama, a heavily entrenched bureaucratic guy whose ideology stops only before it touches his wallet.
So as President Trump reconsiders "health," we should not only encourage him to remain moderate but should remind him that one of his promises was to go after fraud, another "number" omitted by the Obamacare system that actually DISCOURAGED insurers from going after fraud because it was not part of the 80-20 rule whereby they could go after it as part of the 80 percent without it affecting their wallets, the 20 percent, and naturally, when that's the choice, insurers merely raise prices for consumers rather than going after fraud. Similarly the federal government that provides for the rich cash reward for whistleblowers on the inside, leaves no money for consumers who are better positioned to gather and provide evidence of fraud but rather resorts to threats like…Fraud hurts everyone (meaning us, we pay for it.
The lessons of Obamacare are not more Obamacare but they're also not Ryancare without a preliminary commitment evidenced by an initial legislative provision that public employees will be bound by any law these public employees pass and that they are committed, under penalty of stepping down from their positions as incompetent, to REPRESENTING consumers rather than partnering with the insurance industry, providers and their lobbyists.
