Each time a new study or report sheds light on the Obamacare’s true effects on Americans’ health care, the left fights back with tiresome accusations that the source is disreputable, partisan or “sides” with the insurance companies, ad nauseum.
How many professional experts are going to have to find fault with the House and Senate health bills before the Left and their allies in Congress stop repeating the age-old adage: “Everyone else is crazy, I alone am sane”? The terrible truth, of course, is that these reports are right.
In study after study, a few things about Obamacare stand out. Both the House and Senate bills will impose new taxes to pay for health care reform, many of which will affect low and middle income Americans, not just the rich. Both bills expand coverage by adding millions of Americans to Medicaid, one of the lowest-quality government health programs. Despite the President’s promise that “if you like it, you can keep it,” millions of Americans will lose the private insurance they currently have. And, no matter how you slice it, neither bill will “bend the cost curve” in health care spending; to the contrary, both bills increase national health expenditures above official projections under current law. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of Americans oppose the big Congressional health bills , with 57% of Americans believing Obamacare will cause health care costs to go up, and 52% expecting the quality of care to decrease as well.
Though each study uses different methodology and looks at slightly different things, here are three different independent reports to show that Americans’ expectations for the future under Obamacare are correct. The Department of Health And Human Services’ own Office of the Actuary for Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Lewin Group, and the RAND Corporation’s study.
In the following table (a full version, including footnotes and sources, can be found here), we put these estimates side-by-side so ordinary Americans can judge for themselves who is and who is not telling the truth about the legislation.
Now that health-care bills have passed in both the House and the Senate, Democrats just can’t seem to stop themselves from rhetorical excess. Just before Christmas, as the bill sponsored by Majority Leader Harry Reid was clearing its final hurdles in the Senate, Democrats took to the chamber floor and cable television shows to trumpet the “historic” nature of the legislation they were about to vote on — legislation that would, at long last, move toward their long-sought goals of “universality” and a government-guaranteed right to health care.
But is it so?
Yes, both the House and Senate would provide essentially free health insurance, through the Medicaid program, to many millions of low-income people. But, even so, enrollment in Medicaid is a far cry from getting good care when it’s needed. For starters, about 40 percent of the nation’s physicians don’t see Medicaid patients because the payment rates are too low, which also means certain hospitals have very low rates of Medicaid admissions. The truth is that current Medicaid enrollees already have trouble getting access to high-quality care when they need it because the network of providers willing and able to see them is constrained and over-burdened. The House and Senate bills would add 15 million or more people to this program’s rolls without any guarantee whatsoever that there will be doctors and hospitals that can see them.
Ironically, the very Democrats who most frequently tout “universality” as the goal are also the ones who ensure it will never actually come about by insisting that America’s lower-income families enroll in government-run insurance — with no other options.
Beyond the Medicaid expansion, Obamacare is really an obligation, not a right. Every citizen would be required to sign up with a government-approved health-insurance plan or pay a tax penalty for going without coverage. According to the Lewin Group, households with at least one uninsured member and an income between $50,000 and $75,000 per year would see their costs rise for health care by $2,133 under the Senate bill. “A new tax on the uninsured” isn’t exactly a catchy slogan for Obamacare — but that’s essentially what it is. There would be a lavish new entitlement program to offset some of the premium for some households, but the vast majority of working Americans would get no additional help. They would just get the unfunded mandate, and that’s it.
Meanwhile, despite all of the talk of painlessly slowing the pace of rising costs with more efficient care, the Democrats’ bills would cut costs mainly by imposing arbitrary rate reductions in the Medicare program — pushing it more and more toward the Medicaid model. In fact, at the end of December, the Mayo Clinic announced that it would no longer see Medicare patients at one of its clinics in Arizona because the program’s payment rates are simply too low to cover its costs. A small glimpse into our Obamacare future.
In the coming days and weeks, we will hear a great deal more about how close the nation is to making history. Readily available health care for all, without limit — that’s what the overheated rhetoric will imply. But the public figured out months ago that the reality under Obamacare would be very different. There would be higher costs, higher taxes, and more regulation. Worst of all, clumsy governmental “cost-control” efforts would put the quality of American medicine at risk for everyone. Which is why public sentiment has hardened in opposition, and why the debate is not over yet.