The Patriot Post® · Trouble Looming With ObamaCare

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.