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Obamacare Tag

Another year, another ridiculously high health insurance rate hike. Last week I received my health insurance information packet for the upcoming year. I'm the lucky winner of a 53% increase to my health insurance premium. 5-3. I'm young, healthy, and was forced last year into an HMO after the PPOs on the exchanges withdrew their offerings due to inability to offer competitive rates. And no, I don't receive a subsidy. To keep my current plan, I'll have to pay more for one month than I would paying the no-insurance penalty. Thanks, Obamacare.

As we've long said about Obamacare -- rising costs and the destruction of the health insurance marketplace are a feature of the President's hallmark administration, not a bug. Jonathan Gruber, Obamacare architect agrees. In an interview with CNN Wednesday, Gruber explained Obamacare was, "working as designed".

Just yesterday I blogged about upcoming health insurance rate hikes. Health insurance plans offered on an exchange (like those purchased by most self-employed individuals) will see double-digit premium increases. Not only are premiums and deductibles sky-rocketing, but consumer choice is dwindling. Insurer complaints are the same — health insurance consumers are sicker and older than their original models predicted, making affordable insurance a virtually impossible offering. Worse still -- the Obama administration is completely out of touch with their hallmark legislation's ramifications.

The claim that you can keep your plan and doctor was the line that sold Obamacare to a skeptical public, and gave Democrats cover to rework the health care system, comprising 1/5 of the economy, by a bare majority in Congress. That false promise generally is attributed to Obama during the 2009-2010 push to pass Obamacare:

Surprise! (But only if you haven't been paying attention.) At the beginning of May, I blogged about the looming October Obamacare surprise -- seriously nasty rate hikes.
Unfortunately (or fortunately — depending on where you stand) for Democrats, pending rate increase announcements could not come at a worse time. Open enrollment begins the first week of November, just in time for Obamacare and independent health insurance consumers to take their sticker shock to the ballot box.

Obamacare architect Dr. Ezekiel 'Death Panel' Emanuel is back. This guy has an amazing ability to blame all the problems of Obamacare on everyone but the party which passed it and the president it's named for. He also agrees with some of Bill Clinton's recent remarks on the law. The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Obamacare Architect on Bill Clinton’s Criticisms: ‘I Think He Has a Point’

The AARP has started airing a series of ads meant to cause concern about the future of Social Security. It's odd for them to show so much concern after pushing the financial disaster known as Obamacare. The Huffington Post is angry about the advocacy group's use of "conservative scare tactics." From their report:
Nation’s Largest Seniors Group Is Using Conservative Scare Tactics On Social Security Television viewers across the country have been treated to some scary advertisements about the future of Social Security. “Our next president needs to take action on Social Security, or future generations could lose up to $10,000 a year,” the narrator intones, as ominous music plays in the background.

One of the biggest surprises of the Sunday debate was the moment that Obamacare came up as an audience-member question. Hillary Clinton basically said she'll mend it, and Donald Trump vowed to end it. Gone are the days of, "if like your plan, you'll keep your plan."

Obamacare has faced some new problems, including the rising cost of premiums and the shrinking pool of providers participating in the program. Additionally, not enough young healthy people have enrolled to offset the costs created by less healthy older people. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the chief architects of Obamacare and the center of controversy over the "death panel," knows who's to blame... Republicans. You know, the party the Democrats excluded from the law's creation and had nothing to do with its passage. He appeared on the Kelly File and made his case. Real Clear Politics reports:
Architect Of Obamacare Blames Republicans For Law's Problems Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), joins Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly to discuss some of the problems with the law.

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.

It's been seven years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the White House is still having trouble selling it to Americans, especially Millennials. The problem is that Obamacare needs the money of healthy young people to survive, so the White House is trying a new push. The Business Insider reports:
The White House is kicking off a big push to fix Obamacare's largest problem Obamacare needs millennials, so the White House is going after them. The White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, the secretary of education, and private groups convened in Washington on Tuesday for the Affordable Care Act Millennial Outreach and Engagement Summit.

I recently noted that President Obama's climate change edict for our national security strategists shows that he does not take warfare against American opponents seriously. However, the President takes citizen opposition very seriously. For example, he is unleashing one of his most potent tools against Americans opting out of purchasing Obamacare. Over 20 million Americans opted to pay a penalty rather that purchase health insurance. So, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has just sent them a formal letter suggesting they make a different choice.
...Getting a letter from the IRS can be a threatening and nerve-racking experience; it seldom is seen as a suggestion and more of a threat. But at President Obama’s direction, the IRS is “reaching out” to people who paid the tax penalty for not buying mandatory health insurance or who claimed an exemption in hopes of “attracting” more people to sign up for ObamaCare insurance. The government is particularly interested in compliance from healthy young people.

Early predictions of ObamaCare's failure were ignored, yet a new government report shows that American families are—as predicted—having trouble affording and accessing health care. The Washington Free Beacon reports: Obamacare enrollees had trouble affording and accessing health care as well as understanding how to use their plans,...

While he was running for Senate in the 2012, Ted Cruz spoke extensively on the virtues of portable health insurance -- insurance not associated with any particular employer, but insurance that works more like vehicle insurance or homeowner's insurance. Though the idea is not unique to Senator Cruz, in a world where Obamacare is causing premiums to sky rocket, coverage to lessen, and government-sponsored co-ops to flop, portable health insurance is becoming a frequent visitor in health insurance reform circles. "More insurance plans will move with the person, not the job. That's real health security," said Speaker Ryan recently, explaining his new health care proposal. "This is not the twentieth century where you have the same job for your entire career, your entire life. You move around, you bounce around. We want to have a twenty-first century system that's portable with the person."

Single-payer healthcare is the Democrats' holy grail, because it put the government completely in charge of one-fifth of the economy and every single person's healthcare. It's total control, but at least as of 2008, it wasn't a platform on which Obama could run. But as this early video shows, single-payer was always the goal. Similarly, failed 2014 NY-23 Democratic challenger Martha Robertson was a big single-payer supporter. But in NY-23, a Republican +4 district that has a hardcore liberal Ithaca-area contingent from which Robertson hailed, single payer won't fly. So Robertson didn't run on single payer, she ran on Obamacare. But in moments of candor uncovered by Legal Insurrection, Robertson admitted that Obamacare was just the stepping stone to single payer.

The more than 800,000 Americans who purchase their insurance from one of Aetna's exchange plans will be out of luck once this year is over. Health insurance giant Aetna announced late Monday evening that they would be scaling back their Obamacare exchange offerings to a paltry four states. The reason? Losses amounting to more than $430 million.