The Lies of Obamacare
- DHS granted waivers to 111 companies (over 10% unions) including McDonalds and Jack in the Box. The health care insurance waivers relate to organizations that provide their own plans with low annual limits, or “mini-med” insurance plans to employees. The plans typically require employees to pay for their own health care once they hit a pre-set cap. The purpose was to prevent employers from dropping health coverage altogether. Without the waivers, companies have to provide $75,000 minimum in coverage with the amount increasing to $1.25 million next year, $2 million the following year, and in 2014, the coverage amount must be unlimited.
This is a red herring. These companies won't drop health care coverage for their employees. Multiple millions more will be dropped in favor of Obamacare for cost savings. "Grandfathered" plans only exist until plans or policies change, at which point they're not grandfathered any more.
- People who had preexisting conditions were in the millions and were dying because they couldn't get insurance. Only 8,011 have signed up, as of November 1, 2010. Interesting to me, 1/8 of the enrollees have been in PA, over twice as many as CA.
- Private insurance premiums would not rise due to law mandates. Even AARP, who pushed for the bill to pass, had to raise rates on its employees for 2011. Many other companies have had to put multimillion-dollar charges on the books for increased health care premiums for upcoming quarters.
- This law is constitutional; the government has to be in business of providing health insurance. Driver's insurance is legally necessary because it protects others from your behavior. Health insurance is to protect yourself from your own behavior.
- Group rates at a dot-com enterprise for which I worked in 2000 were ridiculously low, because the average age of employees was 23, and at that age (barring rock-climbing accidents, et al) you don't use your health care coverage. If you're good to yourself, you use it less. For older, less healthy populations, rates go up. Eventually, costs get to the place where rationing has to occur. Even people who mocked Sarah Palin recognize the inevitability of "death panels" now.
- Should life insurance now be mandated? And why can't private enterprises be allowed to manage it all? Does government run things better than private enterprise?
- You'll get to keep your doctor, but if Medicare payments drop [$500 billion dollar cut] and your doctor then opts out of covering Medicare patients any more, then how do you get to keep him? The Senate just voted to delay a scheduled 23% pay cut for doctors' services reimbursements.
I was elbow-deep in understanding Medicare reimbursement for wound care for five+ years, and I know that Medicare in general funds around 70% of claims. How are those people going to keep their wound care doctors when claims are not going to be paid at as high a level as they were? No way that will happen.