So Politifact, no fan of Republicans or conservatives, decided its “Lie of the Year” would be awarded to none other than one Barack Obama for his whopper about keeping your health insurance if you like it. The verdict must have been overwhelming because they made the award more than three weeks before the end of the year, thinking nothing any public figure might utter for the remainder of the year could possibly top the president’s false promise.
As the year comes to a close, we will see many more “awards,” lists and compilations, best/worst, winners/losers, as well as predictions for what the future holds. Allow me to make just one prediction – with a few parts – I believe you can take to the bank: the problems with Obamacare will get worse, not better, more people will be uninsured at the end of 2014 than when Obama took his second oath of office, and the president’s promise that the cost of health insurance will decrease by a lot will make the broken promise about keeping your current plan look like just a white lie.
Now that the Affordable Care Act increasingly seems to be the worst legislation passed since prohibition, the left is running from that title. But I feel like it’s my patriotic duty to discuss Obamacare, because I was asked to by the president. Did you miss our leader’s pre-Yuletide tweet? “May your days be merry and bright, and may your Christmas include a conversation about health insurance.” Let’s for the moment leave aside how creepy and perhaps contemptuously anti-Christian those comments were and heed the President’s call to talk about health insurance.
So, is there anything new to talk about? The website is fixed, isn’t it? Well, no – so far they can’t even get that right. But the problems with the website may actually clear up next year – after all, a few over-caffeinated twentysomethings sitting in a dark room can make that happen as they do most coding issues. Perhaps I’m giving the administration too much credit, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that sometime in 2014 the Obamacare website will function properly. That leaves the actual ACA program, and the problems we’ve seen so far, the cancellations and refusals, will prove to be just the tip of the iceberg. Unless profound changes are made, what’s coming is the undoing of healthcare access in America – meaning a functioning healthcare system that allows people to get the coverage they desire at prices they (or their employers) can bear. Remember that on the eve of the passage of Obamacare, fully 85% of Americans professed to be content with their healthcare plans.
The first thing to happen in 2014 will be millions more cancellations. The number of cancellations because of Obamacare’s all-encompassing mandates – things like pediatric dental or maternity care for people in their early 60’s – have not yet hit many people, statistically speaking. Estimates of the total number of Americans affected varies from three to five million. A drop in the bucket compared to the 50 – 100 million who could well be cancelled in 2014.
While much has been made of the implementation delay for large employers to 2015 – that still leaves a lot of Americans ready to get thrown under the Obamacare bus in 2014. Millions of small businesses that offer their employees healthcare coverage will be sending out cancellation notices just in time for next year’s elections. Many of these businesses renewed their policies “off cycle,” so that they could lock in another year with their existing coverage. Basically they arranged to start a new policy in late 2013 that would stay in force through 2014. But, delay as they might, by 2015 all of those plans will have to include all the coverages required by Obamacare.
As the 90 day notices of cancellation that a few million of our neighbors have received recently arrive in the mailboxes of at least dozens of millions more by November 2014, you can almost hear the pro-Obamacare members of Congress quaking in their boots. So here is another prediction. We will see a flurry of bills sponsored by Democrats to undue Obamacare damage. No, they will not do the right thing and repeal this cancer root-and-branch. They will do what politicians have done to the tax code to create its current 73,608 indecipherable pages – start carving out special exemptions for favored (read “electorally friendly”) groups. It has already started.
Did you know many communities will lose volunteer firefighters because of Obamacare? Neither did many who voted on it. Mark Warner has introduced legislation to fix this “technical error.” That’s rich – he didn’t read the bill he voted to pass, and called it a technical error when he found out there were problems with it. Howie Lind, Shak Hill and any other Republicans planning to challenge Warner will certainly bring this all under the klieg lights as election season swings into high gear.
The president’s promise that Obamacare would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family” must have finished high in the race for the biggest lie because it too is a doozy that will ultimately dwarf the 2013 lie of the year, because it will affect almost everyone. This chart shows that Virginians will pay 75-82% more for insurance in the Obamacare world. Let’s see what Senator Warner dreams up to fix that number. He better get to it, because this increasingly blue state (along with many others) just might start to look pretty red when the bill arrives in the mail for everyone’s new and “improved” insurance.
None of these problems factor in what will happen when all those healthy 20-30 year olds decide paying a $90 penalty is a much better deal than subsidizing people my age. What would you do in their shoes? Of course, that penalty will increase substantially in the years ahead, which represents yet another dark cloud on the Obamacare horizon.
Well that’s it for prediction time. I want to personally thank the President for his suggestion we talk about this, though I admittedly cheated a bit on his exhortation to discuss this over Christmas – I try to think only about good things during the yuletide season – and opted to wait for the run-up to the new year. This way, at least no one can accuse me of being a grinch.
