Taxpayers will have a choice: settle for single-payer or bail out private insurance, which otherwise won’t survive the ravages of Obamacare.
Think back to the fall of 2008. Congress was asked to pass a $700 billion taxpayer bailout for Wall Street. We were told it had to be passed, or else the economy would collapse, perhaps into another Great Depression.
House conservatives voted it down. The stock market fell hundreds of points in response. In the ensuing panic, Congress went along and passed the bailout.
That bailout, and the insane, nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill passed just a few months later as Obama’s first act, gave birth to the Tea Party revolution that gave Republicans a 63-seat landslide in the House in the 2010 elections. Voters supported that to stop the run on taxpayer funds.
Next on the horizon is an Obamacare “death spiral” for the private health insurance industry. Taxpayers will now be told a new bailout of hundreds of billions for the private health insurers must be passed, or else private health insurance will go out of business under Obamacare. That would leave the government in complete control of American health care, especially as he who pays the piper calls the tune.
It is called “single payer” by advocates of government-run health care. In plain English, “single payer” means “government monopoly” over health care, more commonly known as “socialized medicine.” That means the government decides who gets what health care, or ultimately, who lives and who dies. For those who think the government is God, such health care socialism is long overdue.
Meaning — spiraling decline in the quality of American health care, the end of investment in new, breakthrough medicine, Sarah Palin’s death panels.
The Obamacare Death Spiral BeginsPresident Obama sold the idea of Obamacare to its most credulous supporters on the promise that it would mean universal health insurance, with no uninsured. That is what appealed about it to the Left, and to the simple-minded true believers in Obama. But even the Washington establishment Congressional Budget Office scored Obamacare as still leaving 30 million uninsured 10 years after implementation!
But the reality is even worse than that. Because the effect of Obamacare so far has been to increase the number of uninsured, rather than reduce it. Consider recent news reports from around the country:
• Florida Blue terminates 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state.
• Kaiser Permanente in California terminates 160,000 policies, about half of its individual policies in the state.
• Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia cancels 45% of its individual policies.
• CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield drops 76,000 individual policies in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., over 40 percent of its individual policies in those states.
• Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh sends out termination notices for about 20% of its individual policies.
The Weekly Standard summarized the impact last month as likely to total 16 million terminated individual policies, out of a total individual market of 19 million policies. So more than 80% of the health insurance policies individuals buy directly by themselves would be terminated as a result of Obamacare.
But the great majority of health insurance pre-Obamacare came through employer-provided health coverage. The Obamacare wrecking ball, however, is terminating health insurance there too. CBO scored Obamacare as causing as many as 20 million workers to lose their employer-provided health insurance. Former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimated double that, or 40 million, in a study for the American Action Forum.
No comments:
Post a Comment