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Obama’s Obamacare ‘Fix’ Shows He Doesn’t Understand His Own Law

by Nov 20, 2013Articles, Health Freedom0 comments

Obama's promise that Americans that they could keep their health insurance if they liked it shows how he doesn't understand Obamacare.

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So you’ve probably heard how in a vain attempt to try to keep his already broken promise to Americans that if they liked their health insurance, they could keep it, Obama announced a proposal that people who were sent letters informing them that they would be losing their insurance to be able to remain with the non-Obamacare-compliant plans for another year. This illustrates how Obama doesn’t understand his own law, much less how markets work.

The whole point of forcing young, healthy people without insurance to buy insurance and of forcing healthy people with catastrophic plans (i.e., low premiums and high deductibles) to get a new, Obamacare-compliant plan (with the Orwellian-labeled “essential health benefits” that these people largely don’t need or want) is so that they would subsidize the costs of care for the sick.

This is obvious if you consider how the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act tries to achieve its goals. One main idea was to allow sick uninsured people to get insurance. Instead of eliminating the subsidization of non-portable (meaning you can’t take it with you) employer-provided insurance that helped take this kind of third-party-payer system take over the market and exacerbated the problem of people losing insurance when they lose or leave their job and not being able to get on a new plan due to a health condition that had developed in the meantime, Obamacare simply mandates that insurance companies have to provide insurance to everyone, even if they already have a serious condition requiring a lot of health care.

That in and of itself would naturally drive up the costs of premiums for everyone else, but the idiocy of this idea — which is comparable to mandating that fire insurance providers sell policies to people whose homes have already burned — goes beyond that, since it also creates an incentive for people not to buy insurance unless and until they get sick. So that, too, would drive up premiums for all the sick people with insurance who have a lot of health care costs. So the “solution” the bungling bureaucrats came up with to the problems created in the first place by their own legislation was to simply force the young and the healthy to buy insurance. Which is both unconstitutional and immoral, but let’s set that aside.

Once you understand why the individual mandate was necessary in the first place, it becomes self-evident that the whole purpose is to force the young and healthy to pay more in order to subsidize the costs of care for the sick.  Coming under fire for this broken promise that people could keep their plan, Obama offered his “fix”, which illustrates how he doesn’t understand his own law because without all those people losing their plans and buying new ones, obviously, insurers will not be able to keep the premiums for the new, Obamacare-compliant plans as low as they had estimated on the basis of the assumption that most people would have to have one of these new plans.

Obama actually had to have people explain that to him after he proposed his “fix”, which would thus undermine one of the primary goals of the law, which is to attempt to keep costs down for the sick not by addressing any of the underlying reasons for why costs are so unaffordable in the first place, but just by shifting the costs around.

This is not the only way in which the law is schizophrenic. While forcing younger, healthier individuals who generally have lower incomes to subsidize the costs for older, sicker individuals who generally have more money, it at the same time forces the latter group to pay higher taxes to be able to provide subsidies right back to the former group for them to buy that insurance that is supposed to subsidize the latter. The whole thing, apart from being immoral and unconstitutional, is perfectly idiotic and just creates so much inefficiency in the market and further eliminates any semblance of real market prices that it is inevitable that it will only contribute to rather than help mitigate the rising and increasingly unaffordable costs of health care.

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