ObamaCare: the mistake America could not afford

[Stephanie]

Face it folks, you were DUPED by your own President and his comrades in arms the Democrat Party...and this law also releases the IRS on you by your FEDERAL Government...how is that freedom in a free country?....is it too late?

SNIP:

By: John Hayward Follow @@Doc_0
3/24/2014 08:32 AM




Journalistic icon Bob Woodward has been in hot water with the Obama Administration and its more enthusiastic apologists for a while now. He’s not going to get any more popular with that crowd after his appearance on “Fox News Sunday” last weekend, in which he related a conversation with a doctor he described as a “very knowledgeable, very involved supporter of ObamaCare” who nevertheless described it as similar to “a car stuck in first gear.”

When Woodward asked this ObamaCare-supporting doctor when he thought second gear might kick in, the response was, “Honestly, years!” because, to continue the clunker car analogy, “the transmission is in the shop for repairs.”



This led to a remarkable burst of blubbering from one of our dwindling supply of ObamaCare apologists, Juan Williams, who sobbed that nobody was trying to count up enrollment numbers or calculate sustainability when Mitt Romney rolled out his health care plan in Massachusetts, and those mean old green-eyeshade-wearing Republicans should just put their evil accounting witchery on hold and give ObamaCare a few years to creak and shudder into second gear.

Which nicely illustrates one of the core idiocies animating ObamaCare apologists: they’ve arrogantly insisted on refusing to accept the very obvious point that Massachusetts is not equivalent to the entire United States of America. A program that more-or-less works in one state (and there have always been plenty of critics, both locally and nationally, who think “less” is a better description of how well RomneyCare works) can prove both Constitutionally offensive and unsustainable on the national level. It’s such an obvious point that it seems ludicrous to have to explain it to adult citizens of the United States, over and over again. Mitt Romney tried to do so on the campaign trail, but frankly he didn’t make the point nearly as well as he should have, and the fact that he had to make it at all was a burden upon his campaign. Like ObamaCare, Romney’s campaign ended up stuck in first gear, trying to explain a high-information concept to low-information voters, while the Idiocracy ran around telling people that Mitt Romney gave a steel worker’s wife cancer just by looking at her.

Let us focus upon a very simple reason Romneycare could survive in Massachusetts – until the incompetence of Barack Obama and his team turned even that state into an ObamaCare nightmare – while the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work across the whole of the United States: money. ObamaCare is hideously expensive, and only a portion of the cost is borne by the inflated insurance premiums so many of its subjects are expected to pay. It’s the worst Cash for Clunkers scheme Obama has come up with yet – it’s costing us billions to get the ACA clunker into second gear. We can’t afford to spend more billions every year while bureaucrats fiddle with the clutch and gear shift, especially since ObamaCare’s critics – who have always understand the law far better than its supporters – think third gear will never kick in.

“After four years of implementation, countless delays, a website disaster, and constant litigation, the Affordable Care Act celebrates its inauspicious birthday this week,” says the introduction to a new study from the American Action Forum. ”From a regulatory perspective, the law has imposed more than $27.2 billion in total private sector costs, $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, and more than 159 million paperwork hours on local governments and affected entities. What’s more troubling, the law has generated just $2.6 billion in annualized benefits, compared to $6.8 billion in annualized costs. In other words, the ACA has imposed 2.5 times more costs than it has produced in benefits.”

ALL of it here
ObamaCare: the mistake America could not afford | Human Events

 

[oreo]

Health care has Always been a state issue--not a Federal Government one. That's why Romney care worked in MA. I was watching a program where a Democrat strategist--actually said the Federal Government has bit off way more than it can chew with Obamacare, and that Obama and Democrats should have never taken on this issue.

The craziness of it is unbelievable. We have people who never wanted to be on Medicaid--they had their cheap plans that they "Liked"--it gets cancelled and because of the O-Care mandates-- they are being dragged and kicking and screaming into Medicaid--when they are more than willing to pay for a policy. Then we have millionaire's who own homes--classic cars, etc. that become Medicaid eligible simply because they reported no "earned or investment income" for that year.

One woman’s demoralizing experience with the ObamaCare website, which her daughter documented in an article this week in The Wall Street Journal, is shining a light on how the health care law is forcing people into Medicaid even if they don’t want it.

"How has it come to this?" Nicole Hopkins wrote of her mother’s experience.

After having had her insurance canceled this fall like so many millions of Americans, her mother Charlene sought a new insurance policy on HeathCare.gov. But it gave her only one choice – Medicaid - which is the government's traditional safety net to cover the uninsured poor.

Charlene Hopkins does not see herself as poor and resents having to stoop to what she believes is a taxpayer funded hand-out, when she prides herself on a life of independence and self-sufficiency.

It is a trait that was nurtured on the Wisconsin farm where Charlene was raised by parents who accepted no handouts of their own, and found dignity in work and in helping others. "The pride is from being able to take care of yourself in all ways, and health insurance, for example, is just one of those things you do," she says.

The White House has repeatedly maintained that ObamaCare expands options, a mantra that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney repeated on Friday. "They'll have choices they didn't have in the past, including a range of options when it comes to levels of coverage," he said.

But those options don't apply to the millions who will be directed to Medicaid, many of them hardly impoverished.

"The system will automatically sign them up for Medicaid, even if they don't want to be on Medicaid," says James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "That's what's happening. So a lot of people are getting signed up for Medicaid just by virtue of what their income is."

A case in point is a Virginia family, who asked to remain anonymous, but who came to Fox News with documents that demonstrate an apparent absurdity with Medicaid selection.

The father owns a $5 million house - entirely paid for. His kids attend expensive private schools. He owns three cars, but because he has earned his fortune and has stopped working , and his wife's new start-up business has yet to produce an income stream, he is considered by the Healthcare.gov website to have no income.

The website put him on Medicaid. He protested in the website's chat area. A screen grab of the dialogue reads: "Let 60 minutes show up in front of my 5 million dollars paid for house and tell America that this guy is on {Medicade} and that the American people are paying {fro} it!"

A navigator replied, "I do understand your frustration, however I have no other options to offer."

There is also strong evidence Medicaid provides substandard care. The Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy wrote in 2012, "Medicaid patients were almost twice as likely to die as those with private insurance; their hospital stays were 42 percent longer and cost 26 percent more."

Many doctors refuse to accept Medicaid patients because payments are low. John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis told Fox News, "One woman in Boston who was in Medicaid said she had to go through a list of 20 doctors before she found one who would see her." He adds, "I asked if she was going through the Yellow Pages," and she said, 'No, I'm going through the list of doctors Medicaid gave me.'

"That tells you something about the standard of care on Medicaid," he says.

Further compounding Medicaid's problems, the CBO projects Medicaid spending will rise rapidly over the coming decade, not just because of ObamaCare, but because of the aging population, and rising costs per beneficiary, which may make Medicaid even more substandard than it is today.

ObamaCare forcing people into Medicaid | Fox News