When you hear Obamacare it can mean different things to different people. For some healthcare has become accessible and for others just more expensive. We know for a fact Obamacare has made insurance premiums more expensive than ever before.
For those who disagree that Obamacare isn’t a form of price controls then I ask:
Why has insurance premiums prices gone up since the law’s implementation?
In fact: The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, has increased premiums according to Debbie Ashford, the North America chief actuary for Health Solutions at Aon, pegged the increase at 8.5% for 2024.
Not to mention all the other years where premiums have risen year after year. For example as stated by the Kaiser Family Foundation, “average annual health insurance premiums in 2023 are $8,435 for single coverage and $23,968 for family coverage.
These average premiums each increased 7% in 2023. The average family premium has increased 22% since 2018 and 47% since 2013.”
Not only are healthcare premiums through the roof, but the quality of your healthcare has been affected as well.
Remember when Obama said you can keep your doctor? Well it turns out it was false.
So the next question would be:
Why can’t you keep your current healthcare provider or doctor?
The answer : The implementation of such a law according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation suggests, “As many as 214,000 doctors opted out of participating in Obamacare exchange plans.”
“Up to 9.3 million people lost their coverage during the first open enrollment period.
Even Obama personally apologized on Live TV to Americans who lost their coverage.
Even then the supporters who claimed Obamacare would increase access to healthcare falsely assumed more people will have access to healthcare . What really happened is that they had insurance more than they had they had the care. Access to insurance does not equate to having access to care.
As stated in the The Hill article, “ Fifteen million people across the nation in 2017, or a whopping 55 percent of the uninsured, were eligible for Medicaid, ACA Tax Credits, or other public programs — and yet did not to utilize such programs.“
As they suggest, the number of people who are considered uninsured have many reasons they do not utilize a public program. Ranging from them using alternative healthcare options outside the system, to being priced out and being too expensive to have. Some may be qualified for subsidized programs but different reasons remain why the assistance isn’t used.
This tells us that government healthcare simply distorted healthcare care, not just for individuals, but for employers as well.
Government healthcare is not even competitive against private healthcare as the majority of people (65 percent of people) are insured or covered through private sector insurance than 36 percent who are covered through a public or government insurance plan according to the Census Bureau.
As what this Washington Post article has also claimed from the Census Bureau, “More than 80 percent of Americans who don’t get their health insurance from a public plan like Medicare, Medicaid or Veterans Affairs receive health coverage as part of their job perks.”
None of this is free.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, Obamacare subsidies will cost about $1 trillion; an additional $1.4 trillion will be spent on the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid.
This was on taxpayer dime, in addition to what could have been devastating to individuals who could not afford premiums under the individual mandate part of the law.
As this Healthaffairs.org article states: “Starting in 2014 the Affordable Care Act (ACA) required all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a tax penalty that gradually increased to the greater of $695 per person or 2.5 percent of household income when fully in effect in 2016 (with some exceptions, such as if coverage was deemed unaffordable).
Basically this means individual citizens were being forced to pay into a system against their will or else pay a Federal tax penalty to make a government healthcare work.
As Healthaffairs.org article puts it, “This requirement, commonly called the law’s “individual mandate,” was expected to be a major contributor to the overall expansion in insurance coverage under the ACA, alongside the law’s expansion of eligibility for Medicaid and subsidies for people purchasing individual coverage through the Marketplaces.”
Gladly the individual mandate is no longer in effect.
In a Socialist way, this would have put many of us in a hard place such as being forced to buy expensive government Insurance or face a yearly increasingly expensive Federal tax penalty.
Our Freedom to choose was limited. It is hard to believe our individual Freedoms were gone when the government took the power to regulate your healthcare choices, to force you to contribute to their healthcare system one way or another. Thankfully at least at the moment we dodged that bullet for now.
This still leaves us with the remaining horrific system of ACA. All the way around, government healthcare is not what was sold to us being as accessible, high quality, reliable, nor cheaper to many individuals.
On top of that, we U.S. Citizens got very lucky to be spared the individual tax mandate that would have forced many of us to pay for unaffordable insurance or else get punished by paying an expensive Federal Tax penalty that would increase every year.
Government over-reach, and its attempts to reduce and control prices, is price control, as when the Obamacare law was introduced.
Thus giving us what we are still struggling with regarding healthcare in our Nation. We are back to square one, only now it’s much more expensive and only sucking away at our tax dollars every year, projected to be by the trillions.
Fortunately there are other alternatives to our healthcare problems, which does include using less government intervention; but those ideas will be covered in an another upcoming article exclusively here on USNReport.com.
So, stay tuned for more on this.