It’s beginning to dawn on some of Glorious Leader’s coalition that Obamacare comes with a whole lot of strings attached. How many, we don’t yet know. How we’ll untangle this mess is impossible to say.
What is becoming increasingly apparent is that like most anything else Government, Inc does, it screws up big-time. The “glitches” associated with getting on the proper website are now legendary. The irony is palpable: the people most in need of health insurance –the ostensible purpose of Obamacare–aren’t getting on. Nor will they get on. Why? Because it’s too easy to give up after waiting hours to get on to a health exchange server. Remember dial-up internet? Does that even exist anymore?
Folks, we’re screwed. Royally. The hatred that Obamacare will generate down the road towards the government is immaterial. Once a Federal program is enacted it never goes away, no matter how odious, how stupid or how useless. At the end of the day few people will be happy. Right now both Parties are being blamed for the impasse in Washington. Both deserve it. But a year down the road nobody will remember the present events. My prediction is that they will remember those who stood in the way and did what they could to derail it.
Time will tell. In the meantime, please take the time to read this perceptive essay by Mr Chris Banescu.
Source: The Voice Blog | Chris Banescu
The essay by Chris Banescu was originally published on American Thinker.
It’s finally dawning on liberals, leftists, and progressives that conservatives were telling the truth when they warned about the fundamental problems and dangers of The ‘Affordable’ Care Act (ObamaCare). As reported in the San Jose Mercury News, reality came knocking for Obama voters and ObamaCare supporters last week. And many of them wish they had not answered the door.
Big believers in ObamaCare are experiencing sticker shock. These folks voted not once, but twice for President Obama. They believed the propaganda that ObamaCare will lower prices and the people will keep their existing plans. They’re now seeing that Obama lied.
Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.
Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.
Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four.
The former laughter and ridicule heaped at the GOP has turned to silence. It turns out that Republicans were right after all. They tried doing the right thing for all the American people, despite being demonized and viciously attacked.
“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
As Winston Churchill so wisely observed, “socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Maybe, just maybe, some Democrats will now see that ObamaCare is a disaster and was designed to fail. It’s a Trojan Horse meant to destroy the private health insurance market and force America into a socialist, government-run single-payer system. Yes, the same model that always brings worse quality of care, less choices, soaring costs, and rationing of care for everyone. As so many other countries have learned, when it comes to socialized medicine there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
This entire tirade against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or ObamaCare is ridiculous. The ACA mirrors the healthcare system instituted by Gov. Romney in Mass. Ask anyone in Boston or Mass. how horrible their healthcare system is. You’d be lucky to find 5 people who don’t like their system. Furthermore, on average, everyone in Mass. is paying LESS not more for good, quality healthcare. So, all this Republican $%@#&^ about how terrible ObamaCare is, is just that, skata. If you don’t like socialism, get rid of your fire dept., police dept., school systems, social security, etc. Don’t be such fools and play into the false arguments of SPECIAL INTEREST groups who have paid off their Republican puppets.
The former laughter and ridicule heaped at the GOP has turned to silence. It turns out that Republicans were right after all. They tried doing the right thing for all the American people, despite being demonized and viciously attacked.
The current Republicans support lots of guest worker programs and only giving a small tax break, it don’t help with the medical. Republicans could have had the state’s do things like expand certain types of free clinics but they opposed that everything has to be due by the market, well is education. The emergency care system is expensive poor people don’t pay and the general tax payer has to pay. Not saying that Obama system doesn’t involved high cost.
Is that IT, George? A quote from “The American Thinker”? The maraschino cherry atop the dollop of Miracle Whip and wedge of iceberg lettuce is the tidbit by W. Churchill.
Obama’s promise: “We’ll lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year. … We’ll do it by the end of my first term as president of the United States” (June 5, 2008).
REALITY: “Taken literally, we know this promise failed spectacularly. According to the authoritative annual Kaiser Family Foundation/HRET Employer Health Benefits Survey, average premiums for family coverage (i.e., the kind of private coverage the “typical” family has) were $13,375 in 2009 and $16,531 in 2013.
In short, average premiums for family coverage GREW by $2,976 by the end of President Obama’s first term. Thus, we can accurately say that both in direction and magnitude reality turned out to be the opposite of what the president pledged.”
______________________________
Obama’s promise: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what” (June 15, 2009).
REALITY: “Virtually all Americans will see changes in their health insurance coverage, whether they want them or not. These changes will increase the cost of coverage for most Americans.
Some rules apply to all health insurance plans, even those that are “grandfathered”:
(1) Plans can no longer impose annual or lifetime limits on how much health care coverage people may receive;
(2) they must offer dependent coverage for young adults until age 26;
(3) plans cannot retroactively cancel coverage because of a mistake made by plan members when applying; and
(4) waiting periods for new employees cannot exceed 90 days.
“Unless grandfathered, health plans will also be required to cover certain preventive care services at no cost. This is as idiotic as requiring auto insurers to pay for oil changes. You might wonder, if gas and oil are necessities for your car, what’s the big deal if auto insurance pays for them? Well, for starters, consumers become less price-sensitive knowing that all or nearly all of any higher price they pay for something will be borne by a third party. Steven Brill’s Time exposé last year and a more recent New York Times piece on the high cost of colonoscopies should settle any questions about whether this phenomenon is widespread in American medicine. In general, Americans pay the highest medical prices on the planet.
Consumers may also undertake preventive activities more frequently than they would otherwise (changing oil every 1,000 miles instead of every 3,000). Case in point: About one-quarter of Medicare patients undergo colonoscopies more often than clinically recommended. Clearly, some of this wasteful spending can be avoided by erecting rules and monitoring to preclude this, but these in turn lead to higher administrative costs.
When someone else pays the bill, the payer always will need to undertake at least some form of monitoring activity to ensure that the service was needed/allowable, that it was actually provided to the customer (the most common forms of Medicare fraud are durable medical equipment never provided and services never performed), and that the price did not exceed some specified “reasonable” level. Otherwise that payer may be subject to massive fraud or excessive payouts. Even if consumers remained prudent shoppers (though there is no incentive to do so when someone else is paying most of the tab) and somehow are cajoled into using precisely the amount of preventive care that they would if they paid for such care on their own, these administrative costs make buying the service through a third-party payer more expensive than if the identical bill had been paid directly by the consumer.”
…
“Defenders of Obamacare say the enhancements in benefits are worth the added premiums, but this defies common sense. There was nothing stopping plans from including any of the benefits now being forcibly imposed under Obamacare. That they did not do so voluntarily implies that the added premium costs associated with such plan enhancements were not worth the added cost to their customers. By definition, in forcing people to do what they would not do voluntarily, Obamacare reduces the social welfare of vast swaths of Americans.
It’s one thing for the content or price of one’s coverage to be changed by meddlesome regulations. It’s quite another to lose one’s coverage entirely. Yet Obamacare also will cause some employers to drop coverage, knowing that their employees can obtain coverage through the exchanges. Estimates of how many will do so are all over the map, with CBO estimating only 9 million employees will lose their employer-sponsored coverage, the Medicare actuary projecting the figure will be 14 million, and former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin calculating the total may be as high as 35 million. As well, Obamacare will slash payments to Medicare Advantage plans, culminating (according to the Medicare actuary) in about half of Medicare Advantage plan members losing their coverage and being forced back into the wasteful and inefficient Medicare fee-for-service system.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/health-reform-breaks-bad_762272.html
But Chris, you don’t understand. Obama said it, it has to be true. Your citations are either fabricated or just isolated instances.
Here in Kansas all of the Medicare advantage plans in rural areas are being withdrawn. A perfect example of what happens to government plans.
Mr. Banescu,
You are a manipulator of fact and detail. It is only your personal relationship with Mr. Michalopulos that allows you to come on to this site, refer to anyone who challenges your manipulation as “Marxists,” “delusional.” and “Oprahs,” and provide you outright censorship of any disgust for your unspoken racial and class prejudice.
I addressed your careful “essay” that began this thread, having thoroughly investigated your “case examples” of individuals who laughed at the Republicans until they “got the bill,” and your presentation is a Rovian, extremist fraud which Mr. Michalopulos chose to censor because I noted that the communities you selected are 91% white with a median family income of $205,000 per year. And you have now earned the “supportive sarcasm” of Mr. Bauman’s ” Your citations are either fabricated or just isolated instances.” Would you care to speculate, Mr. Bauman, at the yearly income of Tom Waschura of Portola Valley, CA who Mr. Banescu notes would see an increase in insurance costs of $10,000 might be? Poor Mr. Waschura is not complaining of bankruptcy or other catastrophe, he is complaining of the loss of “otherwise disposable income” when other tax-paying Americans are choosing home heating oil over essential medications. As I inquired in my post that was censored, why didn’t you pick Brownsville, TX? Why not Detroit? Why not San Bernardino, CA? Because you wouldn’t have found the drama of Tom Waschura. The devil is in the details…
You speak for a protected class. Mr. Banescu, and you fail to see how many live and suffer because of your class needs. And I do not refer to Mr. Michalopulos’ reference to “feral existence” – as if this is less offensive than any racial slur – but working, tax-paying poor that literally have had no expectation of health insurance in the work they do for generations. And now it is the law. And Mr Bansecu, you may write these rude, offensive, extreme-right essays to your heart’s content, but your extremists have lost in the Congress twice, in the presidential election, and in the SCOTUS for one reason: it had to change, it had to start somewhere, and there was no better time than now. And time will prove it was an excellent start.
This is similar to other factually false and misleading memes making their way around the internet. One example is an article about “a 21-year-old Chattanooga State University student” who “a big-time supporter of President Obama who wants to see Obamacare succeed” and is “an Organizing for Action volunteer”.
The problem is of course the facts don’t bear out. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s Subsidy Calculator contradicts this article’s claim. Assuming young Mr. Henderson lives in Chattanooga and applies alone rather than with his family, he would pay only $230 per year, not per month. The government pays 91% of his annual premium because he is at the poverty line. See for yourself at http://bit.ly/GD4UwU with ZIP 37406.
And that maraschino cherry is artificially colored:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/behold-the-horrifying-way-maraschino-cherries-are-made
Follow links in article to make your own healthy marachinos
I wouldn’t want a dear Vladika like you to be poisoned.
Especially enjoy how it is made
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine
Duuuuh! “Artificially colored!” Why do you think I chose maraschino over plain cherry in my comparison? No one ever placed a natural red cherry atop the Gourmet Dixie High Class Salad of iceberg lettuce wedge and dollop of Miracle Whip!
Ridiculous! Well, if you are against Socialism, get rid of your fire dept, your police dept, your school systems, social security, etc. That’s how far out this is. Furthermore, the Affordable Care Act, aka. ObamaCare, is the mirror image of what Gov. Romney instituted in Mass. Ask anyone in Boston or Mass. how terrible their healthcare is. Ask them how terrible it is to receive premier healthcare at a low-cost. It’s just horrifying! Yep, listen to the Republicans tell their lies and distort what’s good for America. VOTE ALL REPUBLICANS OUT OF OFFICE – SAVE AMERICA!
Mr Jones, your reasoning (such as it is) is fatuous to the extreme. Outside of anarchist circles, I know of no Conservative, Libertarian, Classic Liberal, etc. who doesn’t believe in the just functioning of government. It is idiotic to say that fire departments are “socialized.” You might as well say marriage is rape.
Hello George, From reading the Jones post above, it is obvious that the terms, “Mr Jones” and reasoning is an oxymoron.
I really don’t think that this will come as a surprise to anyone, democrat or republican, or Obama himself. As you indicate, the purpose of Obamacare is not to provide health insurance to the previously uninsured, but to destroy private insurance and replace it with a socialist health care system controlled by big brother government. Who will really benefit? Big Insurance, Big Business, and Big Government. We will be forced into even greater dependence on the state, and lose more of the scant resources we have to oppose our loss of freedoms. Even those democrats that had hopes this would be a victory for common people that they could put on their political resumes, but who now see the fraud for what it is, will continue to support Obama and Obamacare out of party loyalty. They put themselves, their party, and their power above their presumed obligation to work in the best interests of the American people. They see themselves as our rulers, not as public servants, and they have no intention of allowing that relationship to be threatened by rocking the political boat.
Isn’t it about time we stopped believing in and supporting these clowns, and started looking elsewhere for men and women who will work for us, such as libertarians, and electing them? Are we really nothing more than a bunch of sheep, like these self-appointed masters believe us to be?
Private insurance company stocks have rallied since passage of the ACA. The market disagrees with your sentiment. All major health insurance companies have seen their stock prices continually climb since Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010.
Not sure how Big Insurance wins at the same time as the purpose of Obamacare is “really” to “destroy private insurance and replace it with a socialist health care system”. That’s similar to the logic in most screeds regarding the ACA, a social safety net, and a positive role for government beyond police and military, though.
Health care providers and middle men (like agents) are a different story, because it’s the increasing costs there that are expected to be driven out.
Please, please start voting for libertarians outside of the Republican Party. Please devolve back into a sort of Dixiecrat separatist party so the grown-ups can get things done.
Be careful what you wish for, 123, but the Dixiecrat tail waived the Democrat dog for about a century after the War Between the States. From 1872-1868 what the Dixiecrats wanted they usually got and what they never wanted, never happened. The Republicans could only be so lucky.
“destroy private insurance and replace it with a socialist health care system controlled by big brother government. Who will really benefit? Big Insurance, Big Business, and Big Government”
—This makes no sense, as 123 pointed out. Either it is socialist and controlled by big government with socialist aims or it benefits “Big Insruance, Big Business” as well, and is not actually socialist. Of course, it is not socialist! When they drafted the bill, they (particularly Sen Baucus, D-MT, funded largely by insurance companies) rejected most socialistic proposals. Remember originally many progressives were against it! Rangel and Kucinich had to have their arms twisted to vote for the final version. Most progressives independent of the Democratic Party still oppose it.
The bill forces people to buy insurance from private companies at inflated prices with no solid regulation of deductibles, co-pays, and premia. This idea originally hailed from the Heritage Foundation as a “market-based solution”. Conservatives are right in their criticism, mind you, of how costs will be kept down (de facto rationing and withholding Medicare reimbursements), so of course “Big Government” is also involved, but its rôle is as an enforcer to (a) force you to buy into the system and (b) assume the liability of the insurance companies for offering substandard care (i.e., covering fewer surgeries and other expensive treatments).
But this is not socialism. Not all uses of Big Government are ‘socialist’.
Actually Thomas, it is socialist; just not communist or Marxist. What you describe is quintessentially fascist.
The hallmarks of a fascist economy:
1. A secular government
2. The government sets the rules and controls competition
3. A few highly connected favored businesses that control the market in a non-competitive way
4. The illusion of choice and a populist rhetoric.
The global economy that we have now is fundamentally fascist from an economic perspective. (One does not require a ethnic enemy to be fascist BTW or any ‘enemy’).
Many insurance companies have jumped on the band wagon because of the obvious short-term benefits to them. Hey, they get to fire all of their underwriters and probably a good portion of their medical staff as well. They will a significant portion of their premium income guaranteed by good ol’ Uncle Sam and don’t have to worry about the expense and time of creating new products that meet their policyholders needs. In fact, they really don’t have to worry about the policyholders at all any more.
That there are many so-called conservatives who are actually fascist in ideology should not surprise anyone. The fascist ideology has been a long running temptation in the American psyche for a long, long time.
Much of what is labeled ‘capitalism’ is not capitalism because it is fundamentally anti-competitive with the government in charge of weeding out the competition.
Most people don’t like freedom in general and even less when it comes to the economy.
In a secular state, freedom is quite dangerous because we are ruled more and more by our passions our desires, greed, selfishness and lust. Someone has to set the rules even if they are tyrannical, capricious, irrational and stupid because in a secular world, freedom means anarchy.
Bauman,
I hear your general points however with your hallmarks of fascism:
1) Fascism need not be secular. Mussolini was secular himself but signed the Concordat. Falangism looked partially to non-Christian philosopher (e.g., Julius Evola) but could not be said to be pro-secular. And what about the likes of Codreanu? Hungarian Iron Guard? Aleksandr Dugin?
2) Sure.
3) Effectively. Technically, in real fascist philosophy, there should be corporatism in the sense that different sectors of the economy should have representation and meet together, along with labour, to decide on economic policy under the shadow of a strong, dirigiste State. Of course, in reality this meant formerly strong corporations made a couple concessions to the State and got preferential treatment. This is echoed today, though I’d say the situation is far from fascist in theory since private, international banks are dominant.
4) Choice is not part of fascism, even in theory.
Capitalism simply describes a system in which the means of production and distribution as well as capital goods are privately held and profit is privately accumulated. It is not restricted to some mythical “pure” free market that has never existed. It is not restricted to supply side, Austrian, monetarist, or any particular type of ‘liberal’ economics.
You appear to say that Obamacare is socialist and then fascist, so I suppose you think fascist economics is a subtype of socialism. That might make sense if you narrowed in on a few fascist movements that supported a nationalistic socialism (or Mussolini’s first fascist manifesto, or the older German Workers’ Party platform). However, you basically describe corruption, or crony capitalism, and say this is a form of socialism. That’s simply not true. Socialism is collective ownership – which may be conceived of as totalitarian statism or anarcho-communism or some levels in between – with the goal of class levelling. The existence of State intervention in the economy, for truly public or corrupt aims, long outdates socialism. Would you also claim the Fed is socialist, being privately owned and doling out free money to huge private megabanks (probably its shareholders)?
In any case, I think we agree on what Obamacare is in essence, which is more important, just not on semantic labels.
One last thing, however. You say, “freedom is quite dangerous because we are ruled more and more by our passions our desires, greed, selfishness and lust. Someone has to set the rules…” I agree, however there is a problem with the Anglo-Saxon conservative-liberal tradition which blabbers about some abstract “Virtue” in society that should temper extreme laissez-faire capitalism: liberal philosophy secularises society and how do you reconstruct Virtue once society is secularised and lacks common values? I have heard no good answer, only the idea that we will retreat into our subcultures and protect ourselves from strangers and the State!
The truth is all forms of liberalism, classical included, end in this cultural defeatism.
Thomas S. Thank you for your critique. I see your points. In reality no one label fits anything anymore in either economics or politics. Our economy has elements of fascism, socialism, capitalism of a sort.
You are right, there never has been a free market and most participants don’t want a free market if it does not benefit them.
“The truth is all forms of liberalism, classical included, end in this cultural defeatism” YES. The reason is clear, they are all deist/humanist philosophies.
Our lack of virtue, personally and communally, creates legitimate reasons for government to regulate. The problem then becomes who regulates and limits the regulators and the whole thing gets completely out of control.
Only a society in which the vast majority of the citizenry actually practice nepsis has any chance of being free for long. We are lingering in a twilight of illusory freedom as we bind ourselves to the debt, consume, dependency cultural model. We have been overwhelmed by our technology in both its dehumanizing aspects and in the extended life expectancies it has produced, often with no greater wisdom.
With all the sincerity I am able to muster at this point… To those who have been among the True Believers in the nascent budding of this New World Order: “Suckahs”
elias, is there any budding that is NOT “nascent?”
As the swine in the village of the Geserines ran headlong to destruction after the demons entered into them, the nature of the demonic is demonstrated fully. Destruction for destruction’s sake.
The technique always applied, starts with bald faced lying within those of a demonic bent.The reality is always a product of this bait and switch technique. Any opposition encountered to the switch is addressed by more bald faced lying.The NWO is fully demonically inspired and fully intends to send us on a headlong rush to social, economic ruin and eternal damnation.
Love God, serve Him alone, live by His Word& not bread alone,do not tempt God, This is the will of God. Do it, and all the lies even spoken cannot defeat you.Fear not, the Christ as overcome the world.These shall do vigilantly, those who know their God.
Michael Kinsey, I’ll try to help you out since you don’t have a Bible: It’s either Gerasenes or Gadarenes, but no Geserines or Vaselines or Kerosines.
The bishop does well to address misspelling and typos, errors that he can rightfully claim to be correct, This gnat straining is worthy of an academic familiar to beatitudes, who I have yet to see an example of in what he writes either typos or beatitudes.Teach and do. Surely, such a nasty. and unwarranted attack on my character cannot be equated proven by my rather lazy approach to blogging.. Actually. the bishop’s opinion could not carry less weight with me than they do now. Ho my mind, he is not Christ’s servant, and I do not pretend act like he is one, because of his clerical rank. He ranks lower than the pope.
An attack on your character, Michael Kinsey? Nothing could be more superfluous or pointless affter reading your post. Where did you see an attack on your character?
(and I’ve never heard of errors that claim to be correct.
Bishop Tikhon Fitzgerald (October 14, 2013 at 7:28 pm) says:
….’It’s either Gerasenes or Gadarenes, but no Geserines or Vaselines or Kerosines.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No Gergesenes?
There are some inferences and well-considered suggestions that Gadara is actually a Mediterranean island near Spain.
I’ll let you know when I find out where Galicia “actually” is!
I think you should have Yes or No buttons in every message to answer the question, “Do you like this person who wrote the message?” And save the thumbs up and down for approval or condemnation of the CONTENTS of messages. There are at least two state-like places called “Galicia” One is a province in Spain and the other is a former province of the Austro-Hungarian empire located in what is now called Ukraine. In modern Ukrainian it’s called “Hollitch.”.
Yes, and St. Paul wrote his influencial “Letter to the Galicians” to the Spanish group during his missionary activities there; this later became falsely attributed to the Galicians on the marches of Poland and Ukraine, which didn’t even exist then.
This has sown endless confusion, and does so to this very day!
I recognize the joke. However, there’s no ambiguity in the location of GALATA a well known town for centuries in the Middle East. As far as i know, St. Paul never wrote to the Galicians of Spain or eastern Europe, but only to the Galatians of Galata.
I suppose “Tim R. Mortiss” could be offering a humorous malapropism. There’s a wonderful point in Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” when Frau Stoehr, a notorious malaprop, observes a cofffin containingthe corpse of a young man on its way to the funeral and she says to the bystanders, “Oh, it’s all so moving: They should play Beethoven’s ‘Erotica!” (She also spoke of her diseased spouse who was killed with a “steriletto.’
No, “Tim”, St. Paul wrote neither to the Galicians nor to the galoshes!
I thought that Paul fell sick in Galicia, and was brought back to health by their tender care, and by prodigious dishes of percebes, the famous local delicacy. Indeed, perecebe harvesters encounter serious dangers to obtain them, which perhaps, or so I thought, was one of the reasons that Paul praised, as well as chastised them.
It seems, however, that my memory is less reliable than the texts themselves!
By the way, I would not dismiss the “steriletto” story outright. The Germans are well known for their sanitary cutlery.
Like everyone else, I do not know all of the ins-and-outs of the Affordable Care Act. What I do know is my own health insurance policy costs increased by a small amount, but some of the people I work with, their policies increased 34%. In addition, from what I’ve heard, so far, one-tenth of one percent of the people who are not currently insured in California have signed up. Yes, that’s one-tenth of one percent! Of course this begs the question, what is going to happen to those people who do not sign up? Those 99.9% who haven’t signed up? If they don’t join in, then what has been the point of this entire effort? In my humble estimation, this effort has once again proven to punish the haves, while not benefitting the have-nots, at all.
Open enrollment lasts six months. It just started. Also, any plan purchased today starts on January 1, so it’s understandable most people wouldn’t be purchasing coverage right now. Not sure losing the first game of a season tells you who will and won’t win the championship months later. Right now, people will be shopping, getting a sense of how the exchanges work, what the coverage differences are, how the subsidies and fines work, and whether it makes sense for them to buy through an exchange or not. In addition, since most companies I’ve worked with change their insurance plans annually chasing lower prices, I expect much the same will happen over the next six months, too. Carriers will take rate (raise prices) on certain kinds of plans with certain kinds of risks they don’t want to underwrite. That happened before the ACA, too. Some may even drop coverage for their employees. That happened before the ACA, too, a lot, which is part of the reason there was need for a health care reform. The difference now is that there is a place for the average person to go to get affordable health that isn’t employer-sponsored and doesn’t require pages of disclosure, and which would charge you based on preexisting conditions, etc. Due to a preexisting condition in one family member, our rates were over $1600 per month. On the exchange in my state, I would pay only $500 now, and that’s without qualifying for a subsidy. Wall Street shows that the health insurance industry is bullish on the ACA. Across the board, their stocks are up. Hospitals and health care provider stocks are down as it is expected they will face further cost controls.
Reality check for those who can still discern the signs of the times, the darkness, and encroaching godless tyranny that threaten our freedoms, liberties, and lives. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It’s Not Just Failed ObamaCare
October 15, 2013
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/its_not_just_failed_obamacare.html
ObamaCare rolled out last week in utter chaos. The ruling class conceit that anyone could stitch together a national system of health insurance exchanges went up in a billowing cloud of failure. Who could have seen that coming?
So what went wrong?
Let’s start with the usual liberal narrative. Back in the bad old days, capitalism was an engine of exploitation and oppression as the bosses sweated their laborers in miserable work conditions. The workers died young with lung disease if they were lucky enough not to be killed due to unsafe work conditions.
But then came liberals and their beneficial legislation limiting hours of work, mandating safety codes, providing pensions, health care, education, and welfare. Finally the darkness of those satanic mills was brightened with a new day of decency and compassion.
But suppose all that beneficial legislation had very little to do with it. Suppose that capitalism was showering untold wealth on everyone from $3 per capita per day in 1800 to the present $120 per day with or without liberals to help.
Suppose that, whatever the ethics of businessmen, prosperity encourages workers to balk at work in dangerous mines, and it provides them the means to protect themselves against hard times and build a little nest egg.
The liberals have spent the last century taking credit for capitalism’s triumphs.
In reality, the ruling class has made a dog’s breakfast of everything it has attempted. Forget the mess of green energy killing birds and “affordable housing” killing the credit system and all the other horror stories. Let’s just look at the Four Bigs: pensions, health care, education, welfare. I use them as examples because usgovernmentspending.com shows that the Four Bigs plus the Pentagon account for most of government spending.
In pensions the ruling class decided that it was better qualified than the workers themselves to organize and maintain custody of worker savings. The big idea of the time was Defined Benefit. How’s that working out for Social Security and the pension systems of many state and local governments?
In health care the ruling class encouraged the idea of pre-paid health care coverage. How’s that going as health care is forecast to eat the federal budget in the next 20 years?
Hey Barry! How are those entitlement reform ideas of yours coming along?
In education, the government has utterly neglected education for the poor while grossly subsidizing the college education of the professional class. How are those student loan payments going, millennials?
In welfare, the government has encouraged the growth of a gigantic non-working underclass, and now even 60 Minutes has discovered the monstrous middle-class scam of disability fraud. And you thought that welfare was solved when Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996?
What is going on here? It’s just politics as usual.
Politics offers two temptations. It offers power to the ruling class, and it offers loot to its supporters. It’s just like the Middle Ages. Or the Conquistadors. Or the absolute monarchs. Or the modern big-city machine.
Notice the difference between politics and capitalism. In politics the ruling class succeeds by offering free stuff to its supporters. In business the CEOs win by offering good products that consumers want to pay for. You tell me which is morally superior.
ObamaCare therefore offers power to the liberal ruling class and loot to the liberals’ supporters. From this viewpoint, it doesn’t matter if ObamaCare doesn’t really work, as long as it’s free. Loot is loot; you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and about 40 percent of Americans have thought that ObamaCare was going to be free.
But if the majority of Americans was once happy with its own health plan and its own doctor, then the failures of ObamaCare matter. Free stuff is one thing, and everyone can applaud the idea of health care for everyone. But if you discover, as retired teacher Cindy Vinson just did, that your old health plan has been canceled and that your premiums are up sharply, and that you are going to have to pay for other peoples’ free stuff, that changes things.
Cindy may decide that the problem with ObamaCare is not just that its bureaucrats are incompetent, or that the president’s waivers to his special interest pals are corrupt. She may decide that the whole system of ObamaCare domination can be summed up in one word: injustice.
Then U.S. politics becomes a contest to see who can be the first to tell President Obama to his face: Mr. President, you lied!
They call it speaking truth to power.
Conservatives would like to persuade America that it’s not just ObamaCare, it’s the system that’s unjust, the whole unjust system of the liberals’ authoritarian welfare state, from health care to welfare.
But will the American people ever allow conservatives to fix it?
Chris, for conservatives or anyone to ‘fix’ the system would at this point require the complete dismantling of the oligarchy that rules us which has become essentially fascist in nature, if that term bothers you call it state capitalism or crony capitalism, but those terms muddy the language and are unfair to real capitalism.
The Republicans are corrupt; the Democrats are corrupt; the Libertarian Party was born corrupt as were the Greens and the Socialists. They are corrupt because they play be corrupt rules of power first, last and always.
No one seeks to govern anymore, simply to gain, hold and use power.
Once a ruling system becomes as corrupt as ours is, especially with the ‘globalism’ that sustains it, there is little hope beyond some form of tyranny after a period of anarchy once the system collapses under the weight of its own corruption. Historically armed revolution or third party intervention just don’t work to promote more freedom.
Freedom, after all comes from God and the virtuous hearts of man. It is not nor can it ever by a system of law and moralism.
Our system has become corrupt because we loved “eating that apple” that consumer marketing has promised for the last 60 years or so instead of practicing even a small modicum of restraint. Pay as you go, became buy now pay later to buy now, don’t pay later just borrow. Economic slavery is the result. Now we have healthcare slavery.
We have consumed ourselves. BTW consumerism is not capitalism either.
Dude, are you for real? Here’s the sign-o’-the-times I’m looking for. Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Switch to decaf. Pronto. Holy Cow!
Chris,
Since, as you know, we are a Republic, we elect people to represent us. 48 times, 48, the Republican led House has tried to stop Obamacare. They have failed 48 times. As you rightly state, “conservatives would like to persuade America that it’s not just ObamaCare, it’s the system that’s unjust, the whole unjust system of the liberals’ authoritarian welfare state, from health care to welfare. However, they have not succeeded. The agents of doom and gloom of “discerning the signs of the times, the darkness, and encroaching godless tyranny that threaten our freedoms, liberties, and lives. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I believe you and those of your ilk are not concerned about Obamacare being a disaster but that it will actually work. What then?
I respect your opinion but I have a hard time accepting that it will lead to what you predict is the downfall of our way of life here in America.
We used to be a republic. We haven’t been for a long time. Obamacare is just the latest symptom of how far the boiling of the frog has progressed.
It won’t work but that won’t matter since it is the only game in town. People will try to adapt and soon the hope and possibility of anything better will be forgotten.
Health insurance is a bad bargain. It turns healthcare into a utilitarian bazaar in which the patient always looses. Informed consent is impossible and options not considered. Obamacare makes a bad system worse.
The one improvement that was made could have been accomplished by merely mandating all health insurance be guaranteed issue. Nobody would have gritched and the market would have adapted.
Still the lingering effect of the problem of other peoples money that distorts both the cost and the delivery of healthcare would have gone on.
Please don’t hold your breath: There is no way in the world Obamacare will work; it was not designed to. All it is is an exercise is seizing power by forcing us into socialized medicine; i.e. a ‘single-payer’ system. Obama’s a Marxist. That’s all you have to realize. The country? It’s already fallen. A good quote by Conrad Black over ath the NRO:
“The Affordable Care Act, then, owes its existence to political treachery, electoral hijinks, and extreme prosecutorial misconduct, and it ill behooves the Democrats and their incessant hallelujah chorus among both the hacks and the incurably gullible in the media to incant with woeful faces and in mournful inflection any misuse of due legislative process. The fact that the chief justice had to transform himself into an acrobat and claim that Obamacare was constitutional, under the federal government’s right to tax, does not excuse everybody else from seeing this ill-conceived monstrosity of a law for what it is and what its provenance is.
It is scandalous that there remains such a sadistic determination to inflict this measure, unaltered, on the country that does not want it, even though it has been launched and has sunk, without a ripple, as soon as it cleared the slipways, as the entire system of joining up and doing as this insane measure purports to require is impossible. Immediately following the oath of allegiance, in every school and similar ceremony in the entire country, there should be an obligatory pause to consider how it happened that the United States, in its dysfunctionality, is on the verge of default on its debt, its legislators’ hands tied by sequestration. The country is broke, paying its bills through a fraudulent sale of bonds to itself, running a $700 billion annual current-account deficit, and its leaders are in brinkmanship talks over the imposition of a law that no sane person now supports and that is impossible to obey.
This is the governmental equivalent of congestive heart failure.”
I think one of the biggest and most important indicators of the overwhelming popularity of the Affordable Care Act is that even in this hotbed of irrational and emotional denial of anything Obaman only three-quarters of these diehards clicked “yes” on the Monomakhos poll! Even here, 55 out of 193 voted No on doing away with it! Looks like it’s here to stay, It remains popular elsewhere except with some representatives with rich ‘angel’-lobbyist friends!
You can fool all of the people some of the time.
I don’t see how more expensive insurance for less coverage made artificially less expensive by subsidies that may not be paid and that forces people who already have less expensive and had more coverage to go with the ACA coverage is popular, but if you say so your Grace.
Is it in effect yet?
Obamacare is still mostly unpopular according to polls. Its popularity right in the beginning-to-middle of the government shutdown hugged 50% but it is down towards 40 again. When it passed it had little better than 40% approval.
The individual mandate had about 20% approval when the Supreme Court released its ridiculous opinion.
There is nothing really progressive or socialist about the ACA. If it were not for our hopeless Blue-Red gladiatorial political culture, I would like to think more Democrats would admit this.
Ironic, isn’t it? Healthcare exchanges are a Republican proposal but cramming 300 million people into such a scheme is unworkable. That’s why they work on a state level (a la Romneycare). That’s another reason we need to go back to the Constitution and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which enshrined States’ Rights.
If nothing else, maybe this debacle will nudge the American people to remember we are not a “nation” but a conglomeration of several States which ratified a Constitution for purposes of securing their liberties.
Well, I’m become unemployed for a while and I’ve worked many years. In Arizona its hard to get Access health care.. So, for years I was insurance when I had an employer and uninsurance when I didn’t. I’m also trying to get another job and I’m living off of savings I’ve gotten upset a lot lately because of this.