Obamacare against America; America against Obamacare

Grace-Marie Turner writes at the Galen Institute:

Top 10 Reasons ObamaCare is Unraveling

You have to wonder whether embattled House Democrats who voted to pass ObamaCare just seven months ago would have stood up to their leadership and said “No!” if they had known what an albatross the law would become on the campaign trail.

If a Democrat boasts about voting for the health overhaul law, it is such a rarity that it makes news. In all but a very few races, support for the law is a huge liability. Nervous Democrats who do talk about it are asking voters to give them another chance so they can fix it and get it right this time. It would be something of an understatement to say that most voters are disinclined to do that.

You just can’t slam such a massive change into law—one that will directly affect virtually every American and every corner of the health sector—without political consequences.

Here are the top 10 reasons the health law is unraveling:

1. State pushback: State opposition is building and will become more intense next year. About 10 states, led by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, are talking about forming a unified front to oppose the law’s mandates. And up to 25 new governors will be elected on Nov. 2, most facing huge budget pressures and most with no intention of falling into line to implement a law many actively campaigned against.

2. Voter rejection: Three states—Oklahoma, Arizona, and Colorado—have ballot initiatives before the voters in November, all repudiating the health law. Passage will give even more impetus to proponents of repeal, following the 71% vote against the law in Missouri in August.

3. Lawsuits: There are at least 15 lawsuits against the law, and the two largest moved forward in the last week. Two federal judges have said that there is enough substance to the constitutional questions to allow the challenges to proceed. Arguments were heard in Virginia on Monday and are scheduled for December in Florida. The suits are marching toward the U.S. Supreme Court, likely in 2012-2013.
   
   Backers of the health law are concerned that if the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional, the court will strip out everything that wouldn’t have passed without the mandate. That would surely include insurance “reforms” but possibly hundreds of billions of dollars in insurance subsidies.

4. Rising costs: Health insurance costs already are rising as a result of the law, and the pressures will intensify. Boeing is the latest company to tell its 90,000 employees that it plans to increase the price of employee health insurance for its non-union workforce over the next few years in response to rapidly rising insurance costs, at least partly because of the health law.

5. Towering deficits: Gov. Philip Bredesen, Democrat of Tennessee, warned in a Wall Street Journal commentary yesterday that the health overhaul law creates strong incentives for employers to drop health coverage. This would dramatically increase the cost for taxpayers, as former Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Holtz-Eakin of American Action Forum has explained. Congress may find it is essential to ask the CBO to recalculate the actual cost of the health overhaul law to protect taxpayers from an even larger wave of red ink.

6. Seniors hit hard: Medicare Actuary Rick Foster confirmed that the health overhaul law will result in “less generous benefits packages” for seniors on the popular Medicare Advantage program and that the coverage will cost them more. Foster estimates seniors’ costs will go up by $346 in 2011 and as much as $923 by 2017.

7. Millions losing coverage: The Principal Group announced it plans to drop health coverage for 840,000 policyholders; millions of seniors will lose Medicare Advantage plans; child-only policies already are vanishing from the market because of HHS rules; retirees are losing supplemental coverage; and major employers such as AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, Verizon, and countless others are considering dropping health benefits over the mid- to long-term.

8. Job-killing mandates: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that nearly eight in 10 small business leaders expect their costs to increase as a result of the new law. Many are fearful of the impact of new health insurance mandates, and the majority say they will be less likely to hire new employees and more likely to reduce current benefits.

9. Searching for the exits: The McDonald’s waiver shows that companies have to be protected against the law to avoid its damage; dozens more waivers have been granted so a million people didn’t lose their mini-med coverage just before the election. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to write less destructive rules in the first place? Or why not give everyone a waiver from everything?”

10. Reduced quality, higher costs: A Wall Street Journal poll last week found that a majority of voters believe the new law will cause them to get lower quality care, pay more in insurance premiums or taxes, or both. A plurality favors repeal, and those who know most about the law favor repeal by more than two to one.

If Republicans capture the House on November 2, expect dozens of hearings to point out the many problems we already are seeing with the law—from driving up costs, to causing millions of people to “lose the coverage they have today,” to massive new deficit spending on new entitlement programs, to budget-busting Medicaid mandates.

As Rep. Paul Ryan said, “This cannot stand!”

Sinking Regulatory Roots: In just a few short months, we see the deep roots of bureaucratic control sinking into our health sector as the debate switches to the mind-numbing complexity of writing regulations.

Maybe they think we just won’t notice the government takeover of our health sector if they can bore us to death. [emphasis added]

At issue: The National Association of Insurance Commissioners meeting in Orlando to finalize its recommendations on how to calculate the “medical loss ratio” for health insurance.

Hundreds of lobbyists were on hand to try to influence the shape of regulations that ultimately could determine whether health insurers, brokers, and others in the health sector can survive and whether millions of people will even have access to private health insurance after all is said and done.

America’s Health Insurance Plans President Karen Ignagni blasted the NAIC vote, saying the rules would “reduce competition, disrupt coverage and threaten patients’ access” to consumer services.

Companies inside and outside the health sector are deeply concerned about the regulatory process that is just beginning to unfold, with many fearing that the rules threaten their business model.

And what’s worse, this rule-making is happening in meetings that are closed to the media and the public.

What kind of democracy and what kind of transparency is that?! It is an ominous beginning for implementation of a law that will reach into every corner of the health sector—and our lives.

This will not stand.

[end of article]

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James N. writes:

Naturally, the law popularly known as “Obamacare” is having a destructive effect on our existing health care system, since it was designed to destroy it. It is functioning exactly as intended.

The first effect, already apparent, is to cause all private investment in future projects, from hospital construction to industrial design, from drug development to conceptual research, to cease. In the eyes of Obamunists, this is a good thing, because all of that private investment is seeking “profit”, and since white man’s greed runs a world in need, profit must be abolished.

The drying up of investment is producing the predictable, second effect, which is to decrease hiring and increase layoffs. Healthcare executives are becoming convinced that next year will be worse than last year, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum, so all health care businesses are contracting.

Thirdly, insurance companies that plan to stay in business are increasing their premiums in anticipation of increased regulation (cost of compliance), increased taxation, punitive surcharges, and decreased customer bases.

Fourth, employers who are able are already dropping or restricting coverage.

Fifth, prospective physicians who might have considered the already difficult pathway of primary care practice are changing career paths, or seeking government employment. A private primary care doctor works 55-65 hours a week, government employees work 37.5. This will drastically increase the already severe shortages in this sector.

Sixth, the FDA, for the first time in history, has begun to revoke approval of already-existing drugs because of their cost. The first victims of this will be independent Oncology practices, whose existence depends on revenue from cutting-edge chemotherapy, but other sectors are sure to follow—not to mention the effects on patients who need new treatments (and whose tax dollars have already paid for the development of some of those treatments).

As I have written before, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a work of purely Leninist destruction. Its sole purpose was, and is, to wreck what we have now in order to create conditions for a fully nationalized system.

As Emperor Palpatine says in Star Wars—Return of the Jedi, “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen it”. I am sure that is the view of Obama and his creators.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2010 09:11 AM | Send