Republicans have fought against Obamacare from the beginning, but now Democrats have started to pile on. President Bill Clinton recently lashed out at the system at a rally in Michigan:
“You’ve got this crazy system where all the sudden 25 million more people have healthcare and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” Clinton said.“It’s the craziest thing in the world,” he said.
Clinton also told the people he supports “an entirely new approach:”
“We gotta figure out what to do now on healthcare,” he said, adding that the current system only “works fine” if people are receiving the ObamaCare subsidies or are enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid.“The people who are getting killed in this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little bit too much to get any of these subsidies,” he said, arguing that the law does not give any new bargaining power for people struggling to pay their healthcare costs.
The law has faced new complications in the last few months. Last week, Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman made similar remarks:
Clinton’s comments in Michigan follow officials in nearby Minnesota recently agreeing to huge price hikes in order to convince insurers to stay. Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman announced Friday that individual market plans could raise rates as high as 67 percent next year. The jump in cost follows this year’s hike of 14 percent to 49 percent.In a written statement, Rothman, who serves in a Democratic administration, said middle-class residents are getting “crushed” and called for urgent reforms in the state’s individual market.“This year the need for reform is now without any doubt even more serious and urgent,” Rothman said. He called the soaring rates “unsustainable and unfair,” while saying the steps they took were necessary to “avert a collapse this year” – after the state’s largest health insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, announced it would stop selling health plans to individuals and families in 2017 and other insurers had threatened to follow.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison had to cut student worker hours “to conform to requirements” of Obamacare. In August, Aetna announced it planned to slash some of its Obamacare to exchange offerings because the company has lost $430 million:
“Following a thorough business review and in light of a second-quarter pretax loss of $200 million and total pretax losses of more than $430 million since January 2014 in our individual products, we have decided to reduce our individual public exchange presence in 2017, which will limit our financial exposure moving forward. More than 40 payers of various sizes have similarly chosen to stop selling plans in one or more rating areas in the individual public exchanges over the 2015 and 2016 plan years, collectively exiting hundreds of rating areas in more than 30 states. As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,” said Aetna in an official statement.
Aetna will only offer exchanges in Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, and Virginia. UnitedHealthcare “announced plans to withdraw from most exchanges” last April.
Of course, though, the Democrats have now decided the public option as a way to fix the mess. They wanted it in the original Obamacare bill, but it did not survive. Sen. Jeff Merkley (R-OR) proposed the new public option resolution, but it likely will not survive since the GOP controls Congress.
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