by John Hawkins
When the Democrats were trying to sell Obamacare to the public, they told us that because of Barack Obama’s magical health care elixir, Americans are going to live forever, in perfect health for free while unicorns will tote them back and forth to magical fairy doctors who will cure all their ills with pixie dust. Obamacare is going to be superior to the current health care system in every way and anything people heard to the contrary was obviously a lie cooked up by Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party to hurt poor people.
It sounded great.
Of course, it also sounds great when a Nigerian prince offers to give you millions of dollars to help him get money into the United States. Unfortunately, those Nigerian princes with the funny names won’t make you any richer, just as Presidents with funny names won’t improve your health care. They’ll just tell you lies like these.
1) Obamacare will cut the cost of your health care. If only. When Obamacare goes into effect next year, many Americans can expect steep increases in the cost of health care.
President Obama (promised)…that the cost of insurance would go down “by $2,500 per family per year.” …In fact, the average 25 and 40-year-old will pay double under Obamacare what they would need to pay today, based on rates posted at eHealthInsurance.com (NASDAQ:EHTH). More specifically, for the typical 25-year-old male non-smoker, the average Obamacare “bronze” exchange plan in California will cost between 64 and 117 percent more than the cheapest five plans on eHealth. For 40-year-old male non-smokers, it’s between 73 and 146 percent more.
2) Obamacare will not increase the deficit. Calling for a massive new government program to cut costs is sort of like moving to Death Valley for the reduced air conditioning bills. Alas, it’s not so. The GAO says it will add more than $6 Trillion in debt.
Obamacare will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), who requested the report, revealed the findings this morning at a Senate Budget Committee hearing. The report, he said, “confirms everything critics and Republicans were saying about the faults of this bill,” and “dramatically proves that the promises made assuring the nation that the largest new entitlement program in history would not add one dime to the deficit were false.”
President Obama and other Democrats attempted to win support for the health-care bill by touting it as a fiscally responsible enterprise. “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” Obama told a joint-session of Congress in September 2009. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”
You mean Obama lied to us AGAIN? Who would have ever guessed?
3) “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.” Soon, many Americans will be happy if they can find A DOCTOR, much less THEIR DOCTOR.
Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.
The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.
Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling, America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020. The new health care law increases demand for physicians by expanding insurance coverage. This change will exacerbate the current shortage as more Americans live past 65.
What good is health care, even the bad health care we’ll get through Obamacare, if you can’t find a doctor to see you when you’re sick?
4) Obamacare will create jobs. That would be true only if you added “…at the IRS” to the end of it, but companies have already begun to move millions of workers from full to part time to avoid punitive new costs under Obamacare.
Retailers are cutting worker hours at a rate not seen in more than three decades — a sudden shift that can only be explained by the onset of ObamaCare’s employer mandates.
Nonsupervisory employees logged an average 30.0 hours per week in April, the shortest retail workweek since early 2010, Labor Department data out Friday show.
…This reversal doesn’t appear related to the economy, which has been consistently mediocre. Instead, all evidence points to the coming launch of ObamaCare, which the retail industry has warned would cause just such a result.
…One way for employers to minimize the costs of providing “affordable” coverage to modest-wage workers is to shift more work to part-time, defined as less than 30 hours per week under ObamaCare.
So not only are they going to get crummy health care, they’re getting their hours cut back, too. Thanks, Obama!
5) If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep it. According to Obama, even though the government is about to come crashing into the health care market like a Blue Whale bellyflopping into a pond, it isn’t going to have any impact at all on the insurance companies that were already swimming along. Why, if you like your own insurance, then there is nothing to worry about because you can keep it.
Yet, just last week Fox News reported,
New health insurance rules under ObamaCare could lead to a host of personal insurance plans being canceled as early as this fall, a scenario expected to cause consumer confusion.
Under the federal overhaul, those policies that cannot meet new insurance plan standards may be discontinued. This means individuals, and some small businesses, that rely on those plans will have to find new ones.
The goal is to ensure that most insurance policies offer a basic set of coverage, as part of the Obama administration’s plan to cover most of the nation’s 50 million uninsured.
Yet it also seems to run afoul of one of the president’s best-known promises on the law: “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”
In fact, state insurance commissioners largely are giving insurers the option of canceling existing plans or changing them to comply with new federal requirements. Large employer plans that cover most workers and their families are unlikely to be affected.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners says it is hearing that many carriers will cancel policies and issue new ones because administratively that is easier than changing existing plans.
…”You’re going to be forcibly upgraded,” said Bob Laszewski, a health care industry consultant. “It’s like showing up at the airline counter and being told, ‘You have no choice, $300 please. You’re getting a first-class ticket, why are you complaining?'”
On a personal note, as someone who buys his own insurance, the cost of my policy has gone up $50 a month since Obamacare passed and I expect it to be cancelled this fall, but I guess it’s a small price to pay for us little people if it allows Barack Obama to feel like he finally accomplished something “historic.”
Obamacare hasn’t fully taken effect yet, but when it does, it’s only going to get worse. Everything from death panels to unimaginably long waits for surgeries to bureaucrats denying effective, relatively common, currently in use treatments because they are “too expensive” are all coming down the pike. Obamacare is too much of a disaster to truly fix; so the best thing we can do right now is let this nightmare become reality, let people see how bad it is and then insist on a repeal or bust. Either the Democrats live with the disaster they’ve inflicted on the American people at the ballot box long term or they do the right thing and allow us to repeal this monstrosity before it does even more damage to our country.
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John Hawkins writes two weekly columns for Townhall and a column for PJ Media. Additionally, his work has also been published at the Washington Examiner, The Hill, TPNN, Hot Air, The Huffington Post and at Human Events.