Why Obamacare is bad for our country
and what we should do about it
In response to a recent letter:
Those who like Obamacare point out certain benefits to the
public and challenge opponents to offer something better. Part of the problem here is that our
government has been creating problems for a long time on the one hand and then
offering to address the results of those problems with the other hand but without
solving the original problems. So the
solutions they offer wouldn’t have been needed if they hadn’t meddled with
things in the first place. Meanwhile, the
solutions they offer add other problems which they will later offer to address,
and the cycle is repeated.
The goal of the whole process is to win elections, and the
means to doing so is to identify a group of people in our country and do
something for them that will gain their vote.
It doesn’t matter what it costs, how or if they can pay for it, or how
it affects anything else. This group
will want this thing enough that they will overlook the bigger picture to
support the people who promise them the thing that benefits them in this one
particular way.
With Obamacare, the targeted groups are those with
pre-existing conditions, certain people who cannot afford medical insurance, and
poor women. In order to win these groups
over, the government is willing to let most people pay substantially more for
their insurance, let millions more work fewer hours while still not having
insurance, and facilitate employers dropping their health insurance plans thus
perpetuating the need for more people to have government assistance to pay for their
insurance.
There would seem to be more people adversely affected by
Obamacare than those who would gain by it, but this is portrayed as a moral
issue that only greedy, selfish people would refuse, and the government hopes
to win the others by other programs or mandates to win their support. Other attempts to win votes without regard
for the larger ramifications have included higher minimum wages, equal pay for
women, immigration reform, government takeover of the mortgage and student loan
industries, unemployment compensation extensions, and calls for early childhood
education.
The roots of the problem that prompted the perceived need
for Obamacare goes back several decades when our country sent millions of our
jobs overseas. They did this by dropping
the tax on imports for more and more countries while taxing our homeland
companies through the roof. So many of
them closed their factories here and moved them to foreign countries.
With the loss of so many middle class jobs went also the
group medical insurance plans that went with them. Now any insurance plan is concerned about
people who only buy insurance when they are sick, so they generally would have
waiting periods for pre-existing conditions, but this is also generally waived
when people had continuous insurance coverage prior to enrollment in this new
plan.
Employer-based insurance plans also offer the best rates, because
they offer group plans. There are moves
today to disassociate insurance from employment, but I think that is a mistake,
because you won’t be able to get individual insurance plans cheaper than a
group plan.
So a reader asked four questions to those who oppose
Obamacare and expected deafening silence in response:
1) What is going to
happen to all those people who have a pre-existing condition?
Short answer, get a group insurance plan. You can’t get a group insurance plan? Then ask your Congressperson and your
President why the blank they sent all those jobs overseas. They called it free trade, but the price for
free trade has cost our country trillions of dollars.
2) What will happen
to all those people under 26 who are on Mom or Dad’s policy?
This is not an intrinsic part of Obamacare. This could be voted on separately if people
really want this. One of the problems
with our current lawmaking process is that they combine dozens or hundreds of
provisions into one law, and there is no way every point can be debated or
discussed.
But then this was never a serious problem before, because
kids either got insurance through their schools or their jobs. But government has been destroying the job
market for a long time.
3) What will happen
when policy limits are reinstated?
I think the question refers to the lifetime limits on most
insurance policies. I don’t know how
many people ever reach that limit. If
that is a concern for the people, the government could easily offer to
subsidize anyone who exceeds their lifetime limit, if necessary. It would certainly be cheaper than
subsidizing millions of policies as Obamacare does now.
Again, this is another separate issue that Congress could
debate that wouldn’t have required an overhaul of our entire health insurance
industry to address.
4) What will happen
to people who cannot afford their health insurance?
The first thing to note here is that Obamacare is forcing
the costs of health insurance to rise dramatically for everybody, contrary to
their promises. The government is
mandating that policies cover things that people don’t want or need. The only people who are finding their
insurance cheap(er) are those for whom the government is paying for most of
it. That means, the government is taking
money from other people to pay for it.
Actually what it means is that the government is borrowing money they
never expect to pay back to pay for it.
The government keeps coming up with more and more things
that everybody should feel entitled to have and which they are deemed
responsible for seeing that they get them.
The reality is there is never enough money to do all that. Countries
can and do go bankrupt, and we are trying real hard to get there.
