Precipitated by a Supreme Court battle and a government shutdown, the dark cloud of Obamacare looming on the horizon has finally hit mainstream America where it hurts — the checkbook.
The gridlock President Barack Obama’s pet policy has induced is only the beginning of the disaster the ironically named Affordable Care Act will wreak upon the U.S.’s already sickly economy. If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period. Sound familiar? Sounds like manure to the millions of Americans now losing their plans, as well as their physicians of choice, in the new health care marketplace. The falsehood guaranteeing people their ability to keep their current plan at its current price has been spoon-fed to the American people relentlessly for months and is a cornerstone of the liberal argument claiming Obamacare isn’t actually socialized medicine.
As Christopher Conover, scholar and researcher at the American Enterprise Institute as well as at the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University, predicts, “bottom line: of the 189 million Americans with private health insurance coverage … at least 129 million (68 percent) will not be able to keep their previous health care plan … the rest will retain their old plans but have to pay higher rates for Obamacare-mandated bells and whistles.”
Those bells and whistles he speaks of are maternity care on an elderly couple’s plan, or pediatric coverage on the plan of a single male in his mid-20s. This is because Obamacare mandates not only that Americans get insured, but also that they get insured to the quality decided by the federal government. More than 15 million Americans are standing to completely lose their insurance because the plans that they chose, they paid for and they liked have been deemed ill-suited for them by the all-knowing nanny state America has become.
In the realms of health care, “you know what’s best for you” has become “the government knows what’s best for you.” Obama’s comments, offered not to the general public, but in his campaigner-in-chief fashion, to his top financial backers at an Organizing for Action meeting Wednesday evening, reek of government paternalism.
Addressing the blatantly false narrative his administration offered on the health care bill, he backtracked with, “If we had allowed these old plans (to continue) … then we would have broken an even more important promise — making sure that Americans gain access to health care that doesn’t leave them one illness away from financial ruin.”
Not only does this statement admit that the White House broke a promise, however unimportant that promise and thus Obama deems his word, it assumes Americans are incapable of choosing health care plans that suit their lifestyles. These blanket requirements for health care plans are not only dumping Americans off of plans of their choice, but are also often raising premiums by rates of 100 percent or greater. Bare-bones plans are more than sufficient for some Americans, and should they decide upon them, who is the government to step in and demand they subscribe to fuller coverage? Ah, and here the real issue lies.
In order for Obama to insure the current 47 million people estimated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to be uninsured, he must redistribute the cash flow in the insurance market. The same logic is behind the mandate to have health insurance. Obamacare requires Americans to load up on coverage they do not need, and what’s more, do not want on their insurance plans as a means to dump the cash into the market necessary to cover the cost of insuring the millions who currently can’t afford or do not qualify for coverage. This concept is classified as wealth redistribution or socialism, in this case within the microcosm of the health insurance market that makes up a measly 18 percent of the entire U.S. GDP. Who else sees how this could possibly go wrong?
Democrats will fight tooth and nail to see the sustainment of this program, as it is the very lifeblood of their liberalist ideal. It’s entitlement at its largest and most wide-sweeping: insuring the uninsured, telling the public what is best for them and turning no one away. The bleeding hearts of Washington in the process of realizing their naïve utopian ideal of health care are going to bleed the U.S. health market dry.
Whitney Greer is a sophomore English major from Medford, Ore.
-Whitney Greer
wearer@go.olemiss.edu
