The Patriot Post® · ObamaCare Is Still Wreaking Havoc

“If you like your doctor or healthcare provider, you can keep them. If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep that too,” Barack Obama infamously stated in July 2009 as he was stumping for his stepping stone toward universal healthcare, the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. It was one of the two big lies — the other being the average savings for families of $2,500 on their health insurance premiums — that Obama and his administration repeatedly stated in their effort to sell the bad legislation to the American people.

In the nearly 15 years since ObamaCare’s passage, the number of uninsured Americans has roughly halved, decreasing to just over 27 million as of March. Yet the cost of healthcare insurance has only continued to rise because of, not despite, the fact that taxpayer subsidies artificially offset ObamaCare exchange premiums.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation report has found yet another problem: People buying plans on the ACA exchange are finding a narrowing field of available doctors in their networks. As of 2021, an average of just 40% of doctors in a patient’s area participated in any ACA plan. In some areas like Cook County, Illinois, the number of participating doctors is just 14%. It’s tough to keep, let alone find, a doctor in a network with percentages like that.

So, by entering the more affordable (thanks to subsidies) ACA exchange, one is entering an increasingly narrow network of participating doctors. As the KFF report notes, “People transitioning to a [ACA] plan from another coverage source may not have been able to find any plan that included their doctor.”

The shrinking number of doctors participating in ACA plans means the quality of care available within the ACA exchange is diminished. However, doctors are leaving due to the price controls inherent in ACA plans. The Wall Street Journal notes, “The disparity in provider networks was even larger for patients with ‘fair or poor health.’ Such patients with ACA plans were twice as likely (34%) as those with employer plans (16%) to say a particular doctor or hospital they needed wasn’t covered by their insurance. Wasn’t the ACA supposed to help Americans with pre-existing conditions?”

Another major problem with ObamaCare is fraud. According to research from the Paragon Health Institute, a significant number of people who enroll in the ACA exchange falsely represent their income in order to meet the subsidy eligibility requirements that have been expanded under the Biden/Harris administration. This has proven to be a boon for insurers. And as Brian Blase at National Review reports, Paragon’s research “led Congress to open an investigation and contributed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' suspending 450 brokers.”

Far from fixing the rising cost of healthcare and health insurance, ObamaCare, at best, only added more bureaucratic bloat and inefficiency to the issue. Rather than “solving” the problem, the ACA has only forced everyone to participate in a broken system, thereby ensuring that it will continue to be broken and much more difficult to navigate and fix.