According to The National Review’s Grace-Marie Turner, the wheels are already starting to come off Obamacare. She writes:
The administration’s own actuary reported on Thursday (April 22) that millions of people could lose their health insurance, that health-care costs will rise faster than they would have if the law hadn’t passed, and that the overhaul will mean that people will have a harder and harder time finding physicians to see them.
The White House is trying to spin the new report from Medicare’s chief actuary Richard Foster as only half bad because it concludes that, while costs will increase, only 23 million people will remain uninsured (instead of 24 million previously estimated).
But looking at the details of Foster’s report shows the many, many danger signs for Obamacare and how many of its promises will be broken …
According to the report — again, prepared by the government’s own health care actuaries — here are some of the program’s spectacular failures:
About 14 million people will lose their employer coverage by 2019, as smaller employers terminate their plans and workers who currently have employer coverage enroll in Medicaid.
Businesses will pay $87 billion in penalties in the first five years after the fines trigger in 2014, partly because they can’t afford to offer expensive, government-mandated coverage and partly because some of their employees will apply for taxpayer-subsidized insurance.
The new “CLASS Act” long-term-care insurance program will face “a significant risk of failure … there is a very serious risk that the problem of adverse selection will make the CLASS program unsustainable.”
Under the new law, national health spending will increase by $311 billion over the coming decade. And instead of bending the federal spending curve down, it will move it upward “by a net total of $251 billion” over the next decade.
An estimated 23 million people will remain uninsured in 2019, roughly 5 million of whom would be undocumented aliens; the remainder would be the 18 million who decline to get coverage and who will pay the penalty.
A significant portion of those newly eligible for Medicaid will have trouble finding physicians who will see them, and the increased demand for Medicaid services could be difficult to meet.
Less coverage, fewer choices, higher costs, and 23 million Americans still uninsured. Outraged yet? Wait ’till you get a load of this:
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.
“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”
The analysis, performed by Medicare’s Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a “nonpolitical” office, set off alarm bells when submitted. “We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff,” says the HHS staffer, “and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary’s office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report.”
And liberal elites/the mainstream press still wonder why ordinary Americans are “angry”! Here’s a hint: we’re not all as stupid as you think. And now, we fully realize that two years ago we elected possibly the most dishonest and inept government this country has ever witnessed. With these revelations, the Republicans should have just been handed the 2010 midterm elections on a silver platter.
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UPDATE: The Medicare Actuary says that the story claiming that HHS deliberately sat on his report until after the health care bill vote is false:
Foster tells ABC News that he received a copy of the bill on March 18, and knew then that he wouldn’t be able to do a thorough analysis of it before the vote. He informed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, about that fact in a letter on March 20.
“We could not have given anything to them the week before the bill was held,” as the Spectator item claimed, Foster said, because he didn’t receive the bill until March 18.
The House passed the Senate Democrats’ health care reform bill on Sunday night, March 21, as well as “fixes” to the bill.
Four days later, on March 25, Senate Democrats passed the fixes.
So noted. However, everything contained in the actuary report that was highlighted in this blog post is accurate.
