We have continuously chronicled they myriad of symptoms that clearly show the Affordable Care Act is seriously ill.
Enrollments have been significantly short of projections. Premiums for health insurance are escalating to the point many Americans can’t afford the coverage they were mandated to purchase. Obamacare state exchanges have been closing, and the largest of the co-ops was placed under investigation for under-reporting its financial obligations.
Now NPR and Harvard, hardly the bastions of Tea Party activism, have declared Obamacare a failure.
National Public Radio collaborated with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to survey Americans’ recent experience with health care. As to the Affordable Care Act, the survey’s findings are damning. They suggest that Obamacare has been worse than a complete waste of money.This is the survey’s only question directly on Obamacare. Most respondents say that Obamacare hasn’t affected them; where it has affected them, most say the law’s impact has been harmful:
For those of you who enjoy schadenfreude, some joy can be taken in the knowledge that insurance companies that previously promoted the complete redo of the nation’s healthcare system are now feeling the effects. Blue Cross/Blue Shield (BCBS) has had a rapid drop in earnings related to this catastrophic piece of legislation.
Fitch Ratings looked at nearly three dozen BCBS companies and found that 23 saw a decline in earnings that totaled $1.9 billion in the first nine months of last year, while 16 had net losses.Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan lost $622 million from January through September last year. Blue Cross plans in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Montana lost $442 billion. And those in Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia lost $266 million.The reason is ObamaCare.Or as Fitch puts it: “Cost and utilization trends from state insurance exchanges from the Affordable Care Act have been higher than anticipated and are the primary drivers of declining earnings.”
However, the impact on insurance companies offers cold comfort to the average American who is struggling to pay twice as much in taxes to satisfy Obamacare penalty.
Halfway through tax season, uninsured filers are paying more than twice as much as they did last year to satisfy Obamacare’s penalty for lacking coverage, H&R Block said Tuesday in an analysis that found other customers are still struggling to match their incomes to tax credits they got from Uncle Sam.The tax-prep giant said its customers are paying an average penalty of $383 because of the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate,” compared to $172 last year.That’s because the mandate, a lever designed to bring healthy people into the new marketplace, rose from $95 or 1 percent of qualified income — whichever is greater — in 2014 to $325 or 2 percent of income for 2015.
I will simply point out that Tea Parties across the country, many of which had members who read the legislation prior to its rapid passage, gave the same diagnosis….7 years ago.
If NPR and Harvard had bothered to understand Tea Party instead of smear it, perhaps our health insurance options and economy would be healthier today.
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