It has now been three years since ObamaCare became law, and the full extent of the law will take effect in 2014, but already millions of Americans have benefited from the provisions, including children covered to age 26, lower drug costs for seniors, and pre-existing conditions no longer a reason to deny a child or adult’s ability to gain health insurance coverage.
The health insurance companies have raised rates in a desperate attempt to harm ObamaCare, and the Republican House of Representatives has voted 36 times to repeal the health care legislation, but it has all been for show, and there is no way that ObamaCare will be repealed, even if the Republicans gained the Senate in 2014, as the President would be able to veto a repeal, and the GOP could never gain a two thirds override to overcome the Presidential veto.
And any attempt to repeal, were it possible to achieve, would so disrupt the health care being made available to up to 50 million or more people, that it would be a crime to take away what has been gained by those who did not have health care coverage before!
Health care has been transformed forever, thanks to the support of Chief Justice John Roberts, who had the decisive vote last June, and he will go down in history in a positive light, and it is hoped that his views on constitutional matters will become more moderate, and that he will back gay marriage, support continuation of the Voting Rights Act, and take an enlightened position on other issues.
But even if he does not, Roberts has changed the course of history, with the assistance of the four Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court!
Reality check: “Health insurers are privately warning brokers that premiums for many individuals and small businesses could increase sharply next year because of the health-care overhaul law, with the nation’s biggest firm projecting that rates could more than double for some consumers buying their own plans. The projected increases are at odds with what the Obama Administration says consumers should be expecting overall in terms of cost. Starting next year, the law will block insurers from refusing to sell coverage or setting premiums based on people’s health histories, and will reduce their ability to set rates based on age. That will raise coverage prices for younger, healthier consumers, while reining them in for older, sicker ones. The rules can also affect small businesses, which sometimes pay premiums tied to employees’ health status and claims history.
– In a private presentation to brokers late last month, UnitedHealth Group Inc., the nation’s largest carrier, said premiums for some consumers buying their own plans could go up as much as 116%, and small-business rates as much as 25% to 50%. The company said the estimates were driven in part by growing medical costs not directly tied to the law. It also cited the law’s requirements that health status not affect rates and that plans include certain minimum benefits and limits to out-of-pocket charges, among other things. Jeff Alter, who leads UnitedHealth’s employer and individual insurance business, said the numbers represented a “high-end scenario,” not an average. “There are some scenarios in which a member could see as much as a 116% increase or over,” he said, though others, such as some older consumers, could see decreases. He said the company dwelled on the possible increases because it was trying to prepare brokers to speak with clients facing big jumps. Other carriers have also projected steep rate increases during private meetings and conversations with brokers. Brokers say they are being told to prepare the marketplace for small-business and individual rate increases as carriers get ready to file specific rate proposals and plan designs with regulators. Insurers are “not being shy that premiums are going to increase in 2014,” and are urging brokers to “brace our clients,” said John Lacy, vice president of group benefits at Bouchard Insurance, a brokerage in Clearwater, Fla. His firm has been hearing from carrier representatives that individual premiums in Florida could go up 35% to 50%, on average, and small-business rates around 30%, though it hopes to find strategies to blunt the impact.
– Aetna Inc., in a presentation last fall to its national broker advisory council, suggested rates on individual plans not being grandfathered under the law could go up 55%, on average, and gave a figure of 29% for small business rates. Both numbers included 10 percentage points tied to medical-cost inflation, not the law. An Aetna spokesman said the numbers are “still generally in line with what we’ve been estimating,” and represented the average impact in a typical state.
– An official with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of North Carolina told a gathering of brokers last week that individual premiums could go up by as much as 40% to 50%, according to brokers who were present. A spokeswoman for the insurer said “we don’t have final numbers” yet on premiums.
There has long been debate, even among insurance experts, over how the law will affect premiums. Because the effect is likely to vary, different measurements can arrive at different conclusions. The CBO analysis cited by the administration determined that average premiums for consumers who buy their own coverage would be 14% to 20% lower because of the law—if the law didn’t change the types of plans they purchased.
But the CBO also suggested the law would lead to consumers buying more expensive plans, largely because it requires coverage to include certain benefits and limit charges such as deductibles. When this effect was taken into account, the average premiums would go up 10% to 13%, the agency said, though subsidies would ease the bite for most people. The agency also said small-business policies were likely to cost within a few percentage points of the amount they would have without the law.”- *Source The Wall Street Journal .http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324557804578374761054496682.html
So the weasels who wrote the Obama health law postponed the pain until after the 2012 presidential election. Popular provisions were put into effect immediately, such as allowing children ? to stay on their parent’s plan until age 26 ?!!, offering “free†colonoscopies and mammograms (in truth, forcing you to pay for them in your premium, whether you get them or not), and giving women the thrill of getting contraceptives at the drugstore without paying anything. The White House also granted 1,472 waivers to certain companies and unions exempting them from insurance reforms so they would not drop coverage for employees and members before the presidential contest. By November 2014 things will be different. By then:
– People in their twenties and thirties will be clobbered with 100% or higher premium hikes, insurers report. Nineteen percent of the president’s 2012 voters came from this age group.
– Workers in retail, hospitality, and home care will lose on-the- job coverage and, in some cases, their full time status, forecasts the ADP Research Institute. The law mandates that employers with 50 or more full- time workers provide an “essential benefit package†that costs about twice what these industries currently offer. Employers will drop coverage. Even the government’s actuaries admit fewer people will get coverage at work after the employer mandate goes into effect than if the law had not passed.
– Employers will be struggling to determine what “affordable†means, how to calculate “full time†workforce, and how to pay the $65 fee for each worker and worker’s dependents.
– Seniors needing hospital care will be shocked at cutbacks. Section 3000A of the law awards bonus points to the hospitals that spend the least per senior. Hospitals are even whacked for what Medicare patients consume in the 30 days after discharge, including physical therapy.
– Hospital patients of all ages will wait longer for a nurse. Cuts to Medicare pay for over half the law, and this will mean $247 billion less for hospitals over the next decade, forcing them to operate under scarcity.
– Consumers directed to a state exchange will worry about handing their Social Security number and 15 pages of financial and family information to exchange “assisters,†temporary workers often from community organizations. Civil rights activists in California are resisting background checks for “assisters†because it would disqualify too many minority men with prior conviction.?!!
In politics, twenty months is an eternity.Thirty-three Senate seats will be in play. The 13 held by Republicans are considered safe. But most of the seats currently held by Democrats are in swing states or Republican-leaning states, giving the GOP several election opportunities. Republicans need only six wins to gain control of the Senate. By the way, three of those states — Iowa, Virginia, and Arkansas — will be hit with the highest premium increases in the individual market.
Reality Check 2: CVS employees, and the rest of America, had better get used to turning over personal health information like their glucose levels and body mass index to their insurers – and to the federal government. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cvs-workers-insurance_n_2915006.html
Starting in 2014, per the dictates of the federal government, your doctor must record your body mass index (BMI), which measures whether you are overweight, each time he or she treats you and turn it over to the government via your electronic health record, which every patient is required to have. Your BMI will then be tracked by the Health and Human Services Department, the agency rolling out ObamaCare, and a bevy of other state and federal agencies.
Shock and anger ensued this week as CVS employees learned that if they didn’t turn over that information to their insurers, they’d be fined. But CVS is merely rolling out what may become one of the most controversial aspects of ObamaCare a little ahead of schedule.
One needs only to look to Europe to see how our political elites will use ObamaCare, and the BMI weight measure they are so determined to record for each of us, to intrude into and regulate not just our health care, but our lives.
In the U.K., overweight patients or those who smoke are branded “undeserving” and denied treatments like cataract surgery (without which they could eventually go blind) and knee and hip surgery, leaving some who don’t qualify for the surgery in agonizing pain. Some of the U.K.’s “trusts,” which regulate the national health care system for various zones of the country, go farther, denying all operations to those who don’t meet the government’s weight dictates except for lifesaving surgery on their hearts, brains or to remove cancer. See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2111109/NHS-patients-refused-treatment-unless-change-lifestyles.html
A recent study shows that a majority of the U.K.’s doctors think the national health system should go farther still and deny all non-emergency care to patients who don’t meet certain weight and health criteria. By law, they still must pay for their health care, of course, even though they are denied the ability to get treatment. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/28/doctors-treatment-denial-smokers-obese
Given all of this, it is chilling that the collection of each patient’s BMI was so important to U.S. Health and Human Services that it was one of the first directives the department issued after ObamaCare passed in 2009. There is a reason for that.
It is clear that liberal elites and the Obama administration intend to take Americans down the same path as Europe. The apparatus to handle federally mandated “health interventions” into people’s lives is already being put in place.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended that all obese adults receive “intensive counseling in an effort to rein in a growing health crisis in America” and that they have “intensive, multicomponent behavioral interventions.” According to the Los Angeles Times, these apparently will involve 12 to 26 counseling sessions a year with a physician or community-based program. See: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/25/science/la-sci-obesity-screening-20120622
In the new health care regime that is coming under ObamaCare, each citizen will be reduced to a single, all-important series of numbers -height, weight, BMI, glucose levels – that tell the government all it needs to know about whether an individual is practicing a healthy lifestyle.
If we follow Europe’s lead, Americans’ weight will soon become the pretext for the government to intrude into and regulate many aspects of our lives through ObamaCare, regulations, and taxation.
Imagine that, not so many years from now, you are in the middle of a hectic day at work when you are called to the lobby. Your health enforcement officer is there to see you for a surprise weight inspection.
Your body mass index is taken right there in the lobby. The fact that you’ve gained 15 pounds since your last weigh-in is noted in front of everyone and immediately recorded in a federal database. Your BMI is a few points over the acceptable level. Your insurance co-pays will automatically go through the roof, but that isn’t the worst of the consequences you’ll face.
In North Carolina, state employees self-report their weight, their height and if they smoke to their state health plan administrators. Those who admit that they smoke or are overweight pay higher premiums. Those who claim they do not smoke and aren’t overweight pay lower rates but are subject to random health “inspections” by agents of their health care plan – at home, at school, or at work – to verify that they have maintained a proper weight and do not smoke. See: http://oit.ncsu.edu/infoplease/new-health-requirements-nc-state-employees
Corporations are now employing some of the same tactics, because ObamaCare incentivizes them.
These fat taxes and punitive charges are relatively small now, but under provisions of ObamaCare, they have the potential to grow to financially crippling proportions in the coming years. As the New York Times reported, current regulations allow corporations to charge employees who fail to meet specific government health standards up to 20 percent of their insurance costs. That jumps to 30 percent in 2014 and eventually up to potentially half their insurance costs. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/health/policy/smokers-penalized-with-health-insurance-premiums.html?pagewanted=all
Given the incentives in ObamaCare, these monitoring activities will no doubt soon be employed on the population as a whole. Corporations are already beginning to adopt them. The only way to escape them will be to decline health insurance coverage in violation of the law and pay a fine.
Given all of this, you can also begin to see the reasons behind the obsessive push from the White House to demonize not just obesity, but the food that causes it. This new obsession with dividing America into classes by weight and health will manifest itself in other ways outside the doctor’s office, where the costs of obesity will be the justification for regulation and punitive taxation of foods government disapproves of. In a recent Reuters story, doctors were already calling for bans on certain foods, restrictions on food portions, and taxation not just of fattening foods, but of “empty-calorie” foods that don’t contain nutrients or protein. See: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/21/us-usa-health-diabetes-idUSBRE85K05Z20120621
One way or another, under Obamacare, you will lose weight, stop smoking, and get healthier – or face the wrath of the federal government. Yes freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. So I guess we will end up telling our children and grandchildren what it was like to be free in America!
What could possibly go wrong?LOL : http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/bobbeauprez/2013/03/13/a-red-tape-tower–over-20000-pages-of-obamacare-regulations-n1532308 , https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=538363012875435&set=a.206402209404852.55340.205694792808927&type=1 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VLL3b-3Qalk#!
Excellent post Professor
obama care is revealing itself from day to day as another progressive train wreck that will insure a bankrupt horrible mess.