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Obamacare wants YOU!

Obamacare wants YOU!

Once-privileged New Yorkers who supported Obamacare are discovering that Obamacare means they’ll be losing some of their privileges:

Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan…They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce…

But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to mean they will no longer have access to a wide network of doctors and a range of plans tailored to their needs. And many of them are finding that if they want to keep their premiums from rising, they will have to accept higher deductible and co-pay costs or inferior coverage.

For this group, will the experience constitute the proverbial being “mugged by reality” and cause them to change their political affiliation? Perhaps for some, but probably not for most, since it takes a great deal to effect political change on a more permanent basis.

Soon many doctors will be getting the same bad news, too:

The medical society has not yet formally notified its solo practitioners, because their insurance plans do not expire until April. But those letters will be going out soon, officials said.

And lawyers:

Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.

How could this woman not have already known what “was in store for her”? Also, although a bleeding-heart liberal, she seems to vote only on how something affects her. Where’s your liberal altruism, lady? Or maybe she’s coming to suspect that the whole thing’s a scam, and that Obamacare doesn’t actually benefit the majority of people.

Was Meinwald under the impression that you could add millions of people to the insurance rolls, give them subsidies, not raise taxes, and everyone would come out ahead? Maybe she thought the only losers would be the fat cats, and that she wasn’t quite fat enough. Turns out she was.

If this group wants to know why this is happening to them, the article contains an explanation [emphasis added]:

…[M]any of the New York policies being canceled meet and often exceed the [Obamacare] standards, brokers say. The rationale for disqualifying those policies, said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, was to prevent associations from selling insurance to healthy members who are needed to keep the new health exchanges financially viable.

Siphoning those people, Mr. Levitt said, would leave the pool of health exchange customers “smaller and disproportionately sicker,” and would drive up rates.

Contemplate that for a moment. It’s one of the clearest and most succinct examples of the callous and manipulative mindset behind Obamacare and social engineering in general. People are pawns to be moved around on a large board: we needed these people here, so liberty and choice can be jettisoned for them.

We said they could keep their plans? Tough. We said later that the plans that were cancelled as a result of Obamacare were only the “junk,” substandard ones? Well, guess what: we lied. Tough again.

It’s for the greater good, after all: Uncle Obamacare wants YOU. As the august Nancy Pelosi would say, “embrace the suck.”

[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]

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Comments

casualobserver | December 15, 2013 at 9:00 am

Almost all of the ‘changes’ that are impacting those who had insurance seems to have only two motives: To benefit a small minority who didn’t have insurance, most of whom are still not interested (redistribution) and to make the interim solution ultimately so unattractive that further changes become the highest priority. It will be interesting to see how Congress and the WH shift and how that second part will evolve. If the GOP can not beat themselves and regain enough leverage, then a serious rollback is in the cards. I’m not betting on that just yet.

    Juba Doobai! in reply to casualobserver. | December 15, 2013 at 8:58 pm

    I think the changes were never about health care or health insurance. They were always about imposing Communism top down on America via the seizure of 1/6th of the economy. Control health care, you control people from birth to death in a way that Democrats all the way back to Wilson, the Roosevelts, Johnson have long aspired to.

A little bit of lying from the White House really pisses people off, but a constant stream of lies quickly inures them and it just rolls off the back. Sort of like ‘one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic’.

This will happen all across the country to these professional association group plans and there will be loud public howls of pain. As these group plan members tend to be the limousine liberals I am a bit short of any sympathy for them, welcome to the real world of socialism.

If you think the GOP will fix this mess then I have a bridge I can sell you.

“mugged by reality”: Cyprus-style Obamacare funding

If You Like Your Checking Account, You Can Keep Your Checking Account

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/366348/if-you-your-checking-account-you-can-keep-your-checking-account-mark-steyn

They will keep repeating lie after lie.

Funny thing is, I still need to see the CARE part of obamacare.
So far, I have only seen the INSURANCE part, which is: screw responsible citizens to favor the other part of the population.
I have not seen a scintilla of a measure directed to actually improving health CARE for those of us (the majority) who have always paid.
I have not seen a tiny attempt to reduce and/or eliminate fraud and other issues that are the real causes of the constant increase in costs.

you can lead a horse to water but you can’t shoot him for being a dumbass progressive.
yet.

People being “uninsured” was never the actual problem.

The numbers of the so-called uninsured was itself a faux issue, a pretext, for Obamacare, which now has disrupted the entire health insurance market to address a problem of uninsured people who also become in need of a substantial amount of health care they cannot by themselves afford.

How many are there? A million? A couple million? Just trying to get some honest stats on how many Americans were “uninsured” (reminder: NOT the actual problem) seems overwhelming. So much spin.

This is interesting though, in light of Obamacare making the pretextual issue even worse) — Facts about the medically uninsured pre-Obamacare:

Why are so many Americans uninsured? The high cost of insurance is the main reason why people go without coverage…

National Review on the numbers:

…The number of chronically uninsured people who would prefer to have insurance but can’t afford it is likely 10-12 million people, or one quarter of the number often repeated by the media. Reporters who cite the 48 million number without providing a full context do their readers a great disservice.

Factcheck.org’s disinformation and spin campaign.

A whole bunch more articles in these links, many vague, with spin, etc.

Does anyone have any good numbers about how many Americans pre-Obamacare were in actual medical need because they were both (1) uninsured, not on Medicaid, and not on Medicare, and also (2) incurring unaffordable medical costs — and what would have been the cost to the collective taxpayer if we had simply instituted some kind of program in which only these cases could have been qualified and their costs paid for?

Doctors and Hospitals promoted ObamaCare because they believed they would see fewer uninsured patients.

The reality is they will lose large numbers of the patients and be stuck eating $5000 copays that their longtime patients will not be able to cough up.

Cry me a river (of crocodile tears)!

Those that supported this continuing trainwreck can ride it all the way down the proverbial cliff into the abyss.

Enjoy the ride!

    Exiliado in reply to GrumpyOne. | December 15, 2013 at 11:46 am

    A have a problem with that.

    It is a train. They go down the cliff, but they don’t go alone. They’re dragging the rest of us.

      Subotai Bahadur in reply to Exiliado. | December 15, 2013 at 3:30 pm

      The train was driven off the cliff deliberately when Obamacare was passed. We are already over the edge. What we are hearing is the whining of those who thought that Obama would decouple their cars, and let them stay safe. It is not a matter of dragging ourselves down if we make sure that they go over the cliff; if we go over [and we have] those arrogant buggers are coming too. And I will laugh as they go.

My guess is that every last one of those people will continue to vote for the Democrat, no matter what.

They are getting everything that they deserve.

No pity from this quarter – their ilk have called me and mine despicable things for trying to warn them that just this very thing would happen.

They wanted this, now they can live with it.

    Power Line published excerpts from a piece by a leftist freelance writer (married to someone of the same description) who’s losing the high-deductible policy they were buying for their family and they’ve discovered they’ll have to pay much more now, but it’s hard to figure out exactly how much two freelancers will pay on the Obamacare exchanges.

    He said they’re willing to “pay their fair share” because they “want the exchanges to work,” and they apparently still support Obama but they’re looking for “clarity and competence.”

    Obvious question: Why did someone who was looking for competence vote for Obama in the first place?

    The naivety of the well-educated, accomplished leftist true believer can be a baffling thing. Do they really think the exchanges can work and that they were intended to work over the long term? Do they really still believe that Obama is a smart guy who wants the best for us?

      Juba Doobai! in reply to Radegunda. | December 15, 2013 at 8:52 pm

      No, dear heart. Not “well-educated”, just credentialed. If they were well-educated, they would’ve been able to reason; instead, credentialed and programmed, they just regurgitate.

“How could this woman not have already known what “was in store for her”? Also, although a bleeding-heart liberal, she seems to vote only on how something affects her.”

No no no no no! She didn’t believe it would affect her at all. She thought she was voting to help “those people.” You know, the “disadvantaged” (aka her inferiors). The idea that something to help those people would affect her too never occurred to her.

Reality always comes as a shock to liberals.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to irv. | December 15, 2013 at 2:25 pm

    That’s exactly right. Whereas liberals are always willing to spend someone else’s money to help the poor, they’re realizing too late that this time it is their own money too.

In the elite sport of progressive luge, the lugers wait for the signal to start their run and give the de rigueur “wave of concern” to the crowd (who are often too busy to notice as they struggle to climb the steep slope to the starting point).

Drag seldom proves a serious problem, as previous stances are jettisoned and the perfectly streamlined “self-preservation” position is assumed.

However, style points being just as important as speed in this event, the judges look for continuous lip service to previous positions from the lugers during their entire run down Mount Maslow.

Did these people try hard to be that stupid? How brilliant they must feel after reality has smacked them up side the head. It’s not as if there were not plenty of others sounding the warning bells. These same shocked people were mostly likely the ones arguing with those who knew that the ACA was a really bad deal.

Insufficiently Sensitive | December 15, 2013 at 1:20 pm

Why are so many Americans uninsured? The high cost of insurance is the main reason why people go without coverage…

That would include the cohort who have ordered their lives to stay healthy, and to willingly bear their personal healthcare costs. Statistically, if they joined an insurance pool containing many customers who sit in front of TVs and get fat, the stay-healthy crowd would know up front that they’d be charged more than warranted in order to subsidize the fatties. So naturally they remain ‘uninsured’, except perhaps for a high-deductible catastrophic coverage for the really serious chances.

THAT’s the crowd which Obamacare deliberately punishes by forbidding the sale of high-deductible catastrophic policies. And I suspect that a large fraction of the ‘millions’ of ‘uninsured’ have been living such prudent lives, until the vultures of Obamacare selected them for looting to subsidize the imprudent.

    It feels as if some of us are being punished BECAUSE we put very little strain on the medical system, which is partly a matter of luck but also a matter of doing our part to stay healthy.

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | December 15, 2013 at 1:26 pm

In the Soviet Union they had “agitprop” and they justified it as “lying for the truth”. We are getting closer and closer to that every day.

Look at that ol’ Geezer.

Gave himself a waiver and then started pointing at us as uncaring scrooges.

Don’t worry. The Democrats will be able to come up with some plausible “story” to pass the blame for all this somehow onto greedy corporations, health insurers, and the GOP.

So long as it is plausible on it’s face, loyal Democrats will take up the mantra, the media will step in line, and the only viable solution can only by MORE control by the government. After all, who will save us from evil, greedy health ensurers trying to get a 4% profit margin so they can just keep the business running week to week.

And shit will get worse. The ultimate goal has always been for private health insurance companies to be unable to provide a government-mandated benefit level at a government-allowed cost. Price controls. At some point, the equilibrium will shift to the point where evil health insurers simply cannot break even, and our altruistic, loving Federal Government will take over from those greedy, profit-driven bastards.

The solution to this will not be less Obamacare. It will be more. Lots more. Until we have single payer, and no one is getting an individual invoice. At that point, enough lemmings (i.e., 51+% of the electorate) will approve since someone else is “paying” for it, and our healthcare system, and our nation, can start to fall apart completely.

The game’s over folks. You can’t stop it. We’ve been fat and idle for too long. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and we as a nation gave up vigilance decades ago. The bill is just coming due.

I betcha these are the same people who think Sarah Palin is an idiot.

Keep in mind, after all of this, only 22% of Americans still would trust Republicans when it comes to Healthcare. Democrats still have the trust of 32%, with the remainder mostly unsure or don’t trust either.

news.yahoo.com/ap-gfk-poll-health-law-seen-eroding-coverage-131710274.html

After all of this, they still trust Barack Obama and the people who f*cked it up more than the people who spent years warning them against it.

If you still think that Obamacare will ever be rolled back, you’re a bigger idiot than the 78% who just want free shit that they don’t have to be directly billed for, come hell or high water. This country will go bankrupt and dissolve before healthcare (or anything else, for that matter) is ever “fixed”.

The only thing left to do is to prepare for when this finally comes apart. May take 20 years, might be done in 5. Only time will tell. But the trajectory that we are on is undeniable.

“Embrace the suck”, eh? Before I’d give Pelosi a hug, Los Angeles will vote REPUBLICAN!