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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