Three more reasons to wipe Obamacare from the history books
February 6, 2013 at 8:01 pm in News, ObamaCare by Dustin Siggins 26 Comments
When it comes to regulating the American economy and the American people into oblivion, only the federal government can be this thorough. Consider what The Hill reported last week:
The Obama administration took new steps Wednesday toward implementing the individual mandate in its signature healthcare law, downplaying the scope of the unpopular provision by stressing rules that allow exemptions from the requirement to purchase insurance.
The exceptions to the mandate are, of course, numerous:
The Affordable Care Act includes exceptions for people with religious objections to traditional healthcare services, as well as a slew of income-related carve-outs.
“A principle in implementing the individual shared responsibility provision is that the shared responsibility payment should not apply to any taxpayer for whom coverage is unaffordable, who has other good cause for going without coverage, or who goes without coverage for only a short time,” HHS said.
People who do not make enough money to pay federal income taxes aren’t subject to the mandate, and neither are people for whom coverage would be unaffordable, as defined by the healthcare law. For employer-based coverage to meet the law’s definition of affordability, it can’t cost more than 9 percent of an employee’s salary.
Undocumented immigrants aren’t subject to the mandate, since they’re ineligible for government assistance to help buy healthcare coverage.
HHS also clarified in the new rules that short gaps in coverage won’t trigger the coverage requirement — meaning people who are temporarily unemployed won’t have to pay a fine for losing their health coverage between jobs.
Anyone who had insurance for one day of a month will count as having coverage for the whole month, HHS said.
The individual mandate is one of the worst parts of the Affordable Care Act – despite its support among many policy wonks across the political spectrum – and completely changes the “free will” contract tradition in America. However, according to the article, some people will be exempt from the mandate’s requirements, including certain low-income Americans and those who have religious objections to the mandate.
Despite the above exemptions for the individual mandate (something the Supreme Court never should have ruled as constitutional), the Administration is still closing the door to religious freedom with the HHS Mandate for contraception/abortifacients/sterilizations. It has expanded upon the exemptions (as it did with the individual mandate) it originally possessed, but still doesn’t allow for religious business owners to hold to the tenets of their religions.
In its defense of the above two policies, the Obama Administration has claimed lower costs to many Americans will be the result. This has always been a controversial claim, and it became all but indefensible last week when the IRS projected the lowest-cost insurance policy under Obamacare will cost low-income American families $20,000 per year. $20,000 per year. That’s more than the average cost of tuition, room, and board per college year, and almost 40% of the median income in America from 2007 to 2011.
Obamacare should be wiped from the history books for any number of reasons, but these three regulations highlight everything that is wrong with Washington-centric health care policy. As Tea Party Patriots pointed out in The Determinators, he who has the power makes the decisions, and right now President Obama and his subordinates are doing both.
between my wife and i we make 26 thousand a year.
Does that mean that everyone that makes more should suffer? Does that give you the right to order the government to take from the people that make more? Where do you think the government gets the money to pay for Obamacare? We currently have 16.5 trillion dollars in debt and over a hundred trillion in unfunded liabilities. Do you feel your kids should live in a third world nation with perpetual poverty so you can have free health care?
Why not get government out of the picture and allow markets to work?
Would you like to get a 60% increase in income? Stop voting for more government!
Get over it Tea Party, Obamacare is here to stay. Now… try and move on. Try to offer ideas instead of constantly complaining and whining about your losses.
How about you offer ideas that will make a difference for a change… instead of dying out like a failed group of (H)atriots.
It isn’t a complaint to state the fact that this is not legal…even if a supreme court justice says it can be…the constitution is plain..the federal government has very limited rights and forcing anyoine, either business or person to do anything, regardless of what it is, is not one of the LIMITED functions of the federal government…no other solution need be offered as there is nothing to solve…the Obamacare be needs to simply be disolved, not to start over, just needs to end as fast as it began
Get over it!!??? I can’t afford it. I was happily going along in life with my employer based health insurance. I was costing me out of pocket, in 2010 about $80 per check. Then came obamacare. Rates went to about $160 per check in ’11. Along comes 2012 $180 per check. My employers contribution was the same throughout.. Welcome to re enrollment time Nov 2012. My portion of heath care is above 240 per check. I can’t afford it. My employer can not afford to increase his portion of contribution/ He went with the only option available to him. He dropped coverage. I say you and your ilk need to die out as the America hating group that you are.
Andy:
Seems to me that your complaint should be lodged against the Insurance company’s that raised premiums in order to fund their lobbying efforts rather than because the cost of business increased. Look at the millions of dollars that had to be refunded due to overcharging. At that, they are only required to pay out 80% of the premiums received to claims. I don’t know of many businesses that have a guaranteed 20% profit margin built in, but then the insurance industry also has an anti-trust exemption. There is nothing “free-market” about the insurance industry!
The only problem with Obamacare is the name! Once the emotionalism subsides, we need to tweak the law to insure it is doing what it should. I would suggest you might find equal or sufficient coverage for less money in the exchanges rather than employer based. Time will tell!!!
Joe: An insurance plan is a dedicated joint escrow account. To blame the managers of such an account for missmanagement is neccesary to the effect to keep them honest.
To legaly require their existance is a means of insulating them from due scrutiny. Which leads to the debacle present in auto insurance, corruption is the modern manifestation of predation, a natural occurrance of kids whose momma didn’t raise them right. There is no record existant of any government doing a better job than momma, and the golden rule is translated as the one that gives me a break.
I have every reason to believe this latest scheme to be corrupt to its core, and, as I travel in my work, I notice that since this law has passed, a new hospital has been erected just about everyplace I look, they don’t spend money like that if they don’t figure it’s a sure thing.
Really? Who are these lobbyists? And why are lobbyists bad? Aren’t lobbyists the people that try to keep politicians on the right track in their minds? Maybe you forgot this, but everyone is a lobbyist in some way shape and form. And although you seem to hate anyone that owns a business, not everyone is trying to cheat you out of money.
Yes laws are here to stay, electoral trifectates enable corruption, and if we simply accept corruption, what in Hades do we get ;involved in government for?
Richard, no law, and no constitutional amendment is “here to stay” each and every one of them can be eliminated. If you need an example take a look at 18th amendment. It prohibited alcohol sales in the US, yet it was undone in with the ratification of the 21st amendment. The list of laws that have been repealed is huge. Obamacare is not an amendment, simply a law and can be voted out (repealed) by congress at any time.
Richard, You are complete idiot. Move on REALLY? It seems that you [deleted] have never stopped blaming Bush!
I work for a manufacturing company, and we are happy that our smaller competitors can no longer undercut our bids by not providing health insurance and hiring illegals.
Also, what about Medicare and Social Security? Aren’t these also not considered un-consitutional and illegal?
There sure are a lot of Constitutional scholars in the Tea Party.
Fred:
The biggest single contributor to back alley employers is the federal government. The food stamp and rental assistance programs are made to order for them, and free healthcare-taxpayer funded- is another means of enabling such goings on.
Pertaining to social security, it is a dedicated tax for a dedicated purpose, it was never intended to be in the general fund. Those in government who have looted it legaly, broke the intent of the program.
Repeal it? Yes! Wipe it from the history books? Never! It is the epitome of the arrogance of a patrician elite of no individual responsibility. The Roman patricians had personal estates, they understood the basics of value and wealth, corrupt? Yes, but savvy. This bunch has the corruption down pat, but the savvy is missing.
This abomination needs to be eradicated! There is a solution to the high cost of healthcare, the same solution that cures high costs in ALL that we buy THE FREE MARKET, OPEN CHOICE. If insurance companies, both domestic and foreign could compete for your business, costs would plummet, just as did long distance costs in the past forty years. In 1964, it cost $1.00 a minute for an international call over Ma Bell telephones. At that time, I earned $60.00 a week. Competition drove that cost down to near zero today with Google Voice and Skype. The less choice you have, the higher the price. The federal and state govts have reduced competition for decades and this is the result, a call for the final nail in the coffin, socializing the industry. As someone who was raised in a socialist system, I can tell you, beware of what you wish for!
Frank,
Google voice is a voice mail application. It is best know to transcribe the voice mail and email the message. It also allows the user to setup a secondary phone number. It has nothing to do with making phone calls. Also, long distance phone calls became cheap due to satellite and wireless communication.
One main reason for higher insurance cost is because America is one of the few countries to have for profit healthcare. Premiums will always go up because shareholder demand profit. Check the profits and stock prices for the top insurance companies. Record stock prices and record profits.
Please remember that in a free market one is driven by profit, but in a monopoly, one can set ones own price, and that is always at a profit.
The unions broke the car companies, and the closed shop state of Michigan made sure they could do it.
We can expect nothing less in a closed shop healthcare insurance scheme.
In a free market, I am driven by the profit motive, but to do business , I must present my product to you at a price you are willing to pay, which is very high if I have jack-booted thugs doing the collecting.
Well said! Tea Partyites just don’t seam to get the fact that “for profit” means profit at all costs, even if it means we live in a sicker society. Our healthcare system is a treatment based system, the more treatments they perform (the sicker you are) the more money they make! They don’t make a profit when they cure you and send you home!
Imagine that, a healthcare system that benefits by keeping you sick instead of well. Trusting an insurance company with your health is about as smart as trusting Wall St. with your Grandmas social security check.
I don’t know maybe we should all just play Casino for a living it’s just about as reliable way to go than the American Healthcare and Banking industries. “Free Markets” are a myth. fellas!
Which, by the way, is what brought us here, the doctors charged whatever they wanted, the lawyers made sure they got it, we got joint escrow accounts to deal with that, the lawyers looted the joint escrow accounts, the managers of the joint escrow accounts upped the ante, the lawyers in government are making sure the doctors, who never competed in the marketplace, get paid, all the lawyers get paid, the criminal justice system- which did the collecting all along gets paid and we-the bottom guy on this totem pole, get the bill. Need I rant more
You do realize that we had a few billion dollars in unpaid health costs, right? When people get the bill, they have two parties to pay, their doctors and their insurance company. The doctors are paid through the insurance company, who is paid by the clients. Because medical bills are unsecured debt, there is nothing to force you to pay the bill. The problem is that it will come back to bite you, and everyone else, in the butt. One of the problems that comes from this is higher premiums. By not paying these bills, everyone’s premium goes up to help pay off the slack that was made by the person that decided not to pay up. So if your upset because of the increasing costs, blame the idiots that don’t pay their bills.
A buck a minute? It seems it was about 3 bucks to call home from my senior trip.
in 2007 the “Free Markets” cost American Tax payers 16 Trillions dollars.
The only thing free market about America politics is the price of a politician.
Why should I support a repeal? I’m cool to the idea of an individual mandate but I already directly benefit from a few of the Affordable Care Act provisions, and I’ve seen so many different “studies” on Obamacare with each one telling me something different that I have no choice but to take the $20,000 thing with a huge grain of salt. Until the law fully comes into effect any attempts to predict the cost/savings from Obama are nothing more than wild mass guessing, perhaps it’s correct but until we’re past January 1, 2014 there is no way of knowing for sure.
How would the Tea Party convince me or a person like me that I’ll be worse off on with Obamacare than without it? And if it is repealed how would they go about replacing it? Considering the fact that most Americans agree that the old healthcare system was broken this is a rather important topic to address.