We are now over 5 years into the “Affordable Care Act”. Our Democratic Senate leader declared we have to pass the bill to know what is in it and little did we know how true that was.
Now, over 30 delays in key
provisions later, we find out:
- we can’t really keep our insurance if we like it as the President said, that was a lie
- we can’t really keep our doctor as the President said, that was also a lie.
There are a number of provisions in
the law that may be beneficial and the goal of working toward good health care
for everyone is commendable; but a 960 page bill and the federal government
taking over 1/6th of the US economy were not necessary to achieve
those goals.
So what has the bill achieved?
As opposed to the stated purpose
of the bill, to increase the number of people with insurance, the bill has
caused upward of 6 million people to have their insurance canceled. As stated, the main purpose of the bill was to reduce costs; yet a main prevision of the law is a 2.9% tax on all medical devises, therefore increase the cost of medical care.
The bill is so destructive that
one of the bill’s main supporters, unions like the AFL-CIO, declared that the
bill will “Destroy the Very Health and Well-being of Workers” and key a Democratic
Senator referred to the bill as “a train wreck”.
The President stated many times
in the run up to passage of the bill that “it will reduce health insurance
premiums by $2,500 per family”, but now we know that the cost of health
insurance has gone up, not down in the last year.
Thousands of Americans come
forward with horror stories after losing their insurance and getting caught in
a bureaucratic nightmare when forced in to the health care exchanges and the
democratic leader of the house calls them liars, and then contrary to the video
showing him saying that exact thing returns to the floor of the house to deny
he said it.
But the biggest lie of all, the
biggest dishonesty about the whole program is the name itself, “affordable”. Nothing
in the almost 1000 pages says or does anything to truly reduce the cost of
health care. Except for a provision to cut the amount paid to doctors seeing
Medicaid patents, which will just reduce the doctors who will accept Medicaid
patents, the bill does nothing to lower the cost of health care, just shift who
will pay for it.
There is a reason a bill
supposedly about health care uses the word “tax” 210 times and the word
“doctor” 0.
So – - high wage earners get a 3.9% insurance tax surcharge
- low and middle class workers get a subsidy
- People are forced to buy policies that they will never use because the deductibles are so high,
- insurance companies get millions of new customer
- Millions more get included in the Medicaid rolls , paid for by the tax payers
- Doctors take a cut in pay, so their patents get lower premiums on the insurance
- anyone using a medical devise pays an extra 2.9% so the government can use that money to provide free insurance to someone else.
- The government gets thousands of new employees to administer the bill, including 5000 new IRS agents to oversee compliance to the new mandate and subsequent tax if you fail to comply, and
- the taxpayers get an increase in federal spending to pay for.
If the President and his progressive supporters were being honest
(not one of their strong suits) they would have called it
“The Wealth Redistribution Care Act” or “The Government Takes Control of
Your Healthcare Act”.
But I did say if….
