The failures of Obamacare are legendary. Millions of people lost their doctors and their plans, despite President Obama’s repeated promises to the contrary. The price of health insurance more than doubled. People with preexisting conditions, whom Obamacare was supposed to protect, found themselves without the best care, paying stiff drug costs, or being denied coverage altogether.
Despite all this, Joe Biden and the latest COVID relief package doubled down on Obamacare. The Democrats decided to bribe away the remaining opposition with bigger subsidies. Now, Obamacare subsidies are available to people making 400 percent of the federal poverty level, about $100,000 for a family of four. This means that people with six-figure incomes qualify for help from Uncle Sam. I’m sorry, but there’s something wrong when people making that kind of money can’t function without the assistance of the federal government.
This is part of a destructive pattern deployed time and again by the Democrats and the Left. First, they screw up the system and make something enormously expensive. Then they turn around and say, ‘oh, but we’ll HELP you,’ like they were the good guys. They did it with college tuition – making it soar out of sight, then federalizing student loans and doling out more tuition assistance. And they did it with healthcare – Obamacare’s guaranteed issue and community rating regulations made insurance much more expensive, but the Democrats handed out subsidies to dull the pain they themselves caused. Now, the subsidies are even bigger, targeting the self-employed and small business owners who were hit with higher premiums from Obamacare but did not qualify for subsidies before the latest COVID relief package. These people typically disfavored Obamacare, but now they are being bought off.
Try as the Democrats might, the bigger subsidies will not make the problems with Obamacare go away. The subsidies will only make Obamacare more expensive and place upward pressure on insurance premiums. The price tag is expected to be $34 billion dollars over two years, which works out to $34,000 of federal assistance for every new policyholder. This is nuts. We don’t have this kind of money to throw around. This is only possible in a country that thinks it can go on deficit spending forever and the bill will never come due.
Meanwhile, the Democrats won’t talk about the bad stuff in Obamacare – the narrow networks or the fact that the program has never come close to signing up 21 million people as promised. More bad stuff came to light, recently. The government authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in Obamacare subsidies to keep people insured even though they should have been dropped for not paying their premiums. A father and son from California were sentenced to prison recently in a $27 million scheme to defraud the Obamacare program in 12 states.
And here’s my favorite one from recent news: Health insurers are inflating the claims they report paying in order to escape hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates Obamacare requires they pay consumers. Rube Goldberg strikes again! If Obamacare weren’t so cockamamie, this wouldn’t be happening.
If you want to reduce premiums and deductibles or give policyholders access to more doctors and hospitals, you don’t do it by increasing subsidies. You do it by repealing Obamacare’s expensive regulations and getting the government out of healthcare. Obamacare was the wrong direction for the country when it was passed, and it’s still the wrong direction no matter how much the Democrats make us pay to paper over the problems.
REPEAL OBAMACARE NOW!
– legalize true catastrophic insurance
– return Medicaid to a poverty program
END THE OBAMACARE CONGRESSIONAL EXEMPTION!