Fellow Patriot: The voluntary financial generosity of supporters like you keeps our hard-hitting analysis coming. Please support the 2024 Year-End Campaign today. Thank you for your support! —Nate Jackson, Managing Editor

May 3, 2016

Trouble Looming With ObamaCare

November 1 will bring more painful rate increases.

If somehow you still like your health insurance plan, then get ready to dislike it this coming November. If you don’t like your health insurance plan, well, then be prepared to go from bad to worse. Regardless of what Barack Obama says over the coming months about his crowning “achievement” of ObamaCare, there’s trouble looming and it isn’t going to bode well for most Americans. Or Democrats come Election Day.

As we remember all too well, Obama and his party lied about “affordable health care” from the very beginning. More than six years ago, Obama said, “This legislation will … lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades. It is paid for. It is fiscally responsible. And it will help lift a decades-long drag on our economy.” Yet every year ObamaCare has been in place, health insurance — in terms of cost and coverage — has gotten worse. And the deficit is only beginning.

Perhaps the statement that Obama made more than any other during his tenure — “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” — has proved to be one of the more epic lies in American history. Millions of Americans lost the plans they had before ObamaCare, and virtually no one is paying less as Obama also promised. After ObamaCare was signed into law, those plans changed or the cost went up and in most cases both happened simultaneously.

In fact, most health care plans now have higher premiums, higher deductibles and less coverage — including our own. To be blunt, the health care options that most people can afford flat out stink. As with any government mandate, it is never about quality, it’s about quantity and control.

ObamaCare has been so bad that forecasts for people enrolling in the marketplace have been off target by millions of people every year since the government mandate for health insurance was implemented. And this coming year’s numbers will no doubt continue the downward spiral.

ObamaCare has not just been bad for Americans wanting or needing health insurance, it has also been bad for insurance companies who were or are part of the market exchange. Insurance companies have been losing millions of dollars since ObamaCare was put in place, though don’t cry for them — they lobbied for it, imagining a flood of new customers forced to buy their product. When it didn’t quite work out as they hoped, UnitedHealth recently announced that it was going to “distance itself from ObamaCare” and that it would be leaving several state exchanges by 2017.

This coming fall, Americans will undergo another round of sticker shock. That’s right, when ObamaCare’s next open enrollment period begins on November 1, customers will most likely be faced with double digit rate hikes on their health insurance plans. Again. We suspect that this won’t work out well for Democrats on November 8.

As Mark Alexander noted several years ago, “With increasing frequency, Americans of every political stripe who have any issue with health care, whether a hangnail or heart transplant, a delay in a doctor’s office or in critical care for a loved one, will tie blame for their discontent like a noose around the necks of Obama and his Democrats, who are solely responsible for forcing this abomination upon the American people.”

Democrats will claim that Republicans have no alternative to ObamaCare, though there are several GOP alternatives, and conservative candidates running for office need to emphasize the concept of free markets for health insurance. Democrats in the same breath will push to save the government program by expanding it further. Indeed, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and a host of others will join in chorus to sell us another bag of lies in the name of saving ObamaCare from itself, perhaps by heading toward a single-payer system.

Sadly, many people will buy the lies. But there are real-life examples of the failure of single-payer systems. Take, for instance, the United Kingdom.

Six months ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ran a report on the National Health Service in the UK and announced that its health care system was one of the worst in the world.

In its report, the OECD highlighted that hospitals were underequipped and understaffed and that people were needlessly dying due to “chronic lack of investment.” Furthermore, the report mentioned that while access to care is “generally good” the quality of care in the UK is “poor to mediocre” across several key health areas. The NHS also struggles simply to get the “basics” right. Sounds eerily familiar to all of our government programs, does it not?

Yet a single-payer system is what many Democrats want for America. In fact, one might conclude they designed ObamaCare to fail for just that end. It’s another terrible idea that simply doesn’t work, but there’s something even more important at stake. Errant Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, the federal government has no constitutional authority to force Americans to buy health insurance, and it definitely has no business establishing a single-payer system.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.