I will start with conceding that eliminating the issue of people being unable to get health insurance due to pre-existing conditions and making coverage of maternity mandatory are essentially good things that corrected issues which were increasingly problematic for our society.
The stated goals of Obamacare were to eliminate people being uninsured and to reduce the cost of health care and thus lower the cost of health insurance while simultaneously increasing the quality of care. By May of 2014 we can now begin to look back and factually state that ObamaCare has failed to accomplish any of these goals in any meaningful way. Four years of efforts and billions of dollars have resulted in less than a 4% decrease in the number of uninsured Americans, still leaving 30+ million uninsured. Healthcare costs have continued to rise and utilization rates have increased by 7.1% in the first quarter of 2014 so we now have both higher unit costs and increased per capita consumption of health care services. This will translate into higher premium costs in 2015. Changes in health plan benefit designs and provider networks necessitated by the need to comply with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act have some chronically ill citizens facing higher out of pocket expenses for their health care and losing access to their established physician and hospital relationships and disruption in their courses of treatment and access to certain prescriptions.
As a transitional product, the government created a program called the Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP). This plan provided comprehensive, subsidized major medical coverage to persons who were uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. There was no underwriting, you just had to prove you were uninsurable and you were in. The benefits were consistent with if not superior to what many Americans had through their private individual health insurance or what they received through their jobs. If the objective was to provide quality, affordable health insurance for the uninsurable then properly funding and continuing this program would have been much more cost effective and less disruptive to society in general than the results we have seen to date from ObamaCare.
Books have been written and will be written on the failures and shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act and they are too numerous to go into here. Of course, there are those who now have "affordable" health insurance because they are receiving subsidies. In practical economic terms though, how effective is any system that requires massive subsidization in order to function? such an approach introduces inefficiencies from the bureaucracy required to administer it and is largely a transfer of wealth mechanism. Indeed, it creates a whole new set of problems for those too "rich" to qualify for subsidies but who now struggle or find themselves unable to afford the much higher premium costs of Obamacare compliant health plans. We take from the middle and upper middle class to subsidize the lower middle class and poor. All in a new system that the very politicians who created it have made sure that they and their families do not have to participate in. These are just some of the things that are wrong with Obamacare.
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The stated goals of Obamacare were to eliminate people being uninsured and to reduce the cost of health care and thus lower the cost of health insurance while simultaneously increasing the quality of care. By May of 2014 we can now begin to look back and factually state that ObamaCare has failed to accomplish any of these goals in any meaningful way. Four years of efforts and billions of dollars have resulted in less than a 4% decrease in the number of uninsured Americans, still leaving 30+ million uninsured. Healthcare costs have continued to rise and utilization rates have increased by 7.1% in the first quarter of 2014 so we now have both higher unit costs and increased per capita consumption of health care services. This will translate into higher premium costs in 2015. Changes in health plan benefit designs and provider networks necessitated by the need to comply with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act have some chronically ill citizens facing higher out of pocket expenses for their health care and losing access to their established physician and hospital relationships and disruption in their courses of treatment and access to certain prescriptions.
As a transitional product, the government created a program called the Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan (PCIP). This plan provided comprehensive, subsidized major medical coverage to persons who were uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. There was no underwriting, you just had to prove you were uninsurable and you were in. The benefits were consistent with if not superior to what many Americans had through their private individual health insurance or what they received through their jobs. If the objective was to provide quality, affordable health insurance for the uninsurable then properly funding and continuing this program would have been much more cost effective and less disruptive to society in general than the results we have seen to date from ObamaCare.
Books have been written and will be written on the failures and shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act and they are too numerous to go into here. Of course, there are those who now have "affordable" health insurance because they are receiving subsidies. In practical economic terms though, how effective is any system that requires massive subsidization in order to function? such an approach introduces inefficiencies from the bureaucracy required to administer it and is largely a transfer of wealth mechanism. Indeed, it creates a whole new set of problems for those too "rich" to qualify for subsidies but who now struggle or find themselves unable to afford the much higher premium costs of Obamacare compliant health plans. We take from the middle and upper middle class to subsidize the lower middle class and poor. All in a new system that the very politicians who created it have made sure that they and their families do not have to participate in. These are just some of the things that are wrong with Obamacare.