1. Premiums are skyrocketing.
Earlier in 2016, the Obama administration admitted that Obamacare's premiums
would increase by an average of 25 percent, but attempted to spin it by
suggesting that most people wouldn't feel the increase because of higher
subsidies to help offset the costs. However, former Treasury Department and
Office of Management and Budget staffer J.T. Young noted in RealClearMarkets
that this defense ignores the cost to the taxpayer as well as the fact that
subsidies are indicative of a bad economic model:
Successful economic endeavors do not need subsidies. Producers create a product
consumers want to buy and realize a competitive rate of profit. Both sides gain
and willingly enter into a transaction. Absent that mutually beneficial
relationship, there is no market.
ObamaCare shows what occurs when government tries to enforce a market. By
applying subsidies to one or both sides of the economic equation, its enforced
market cannot exist without continued government subsidies in the short-term,
and becomes unsustainable in the long-term as politics compounds subsidies'
distortion.
There's also the fact that there are millions of people on the Obamacare
exchanges who won't qualify for the subsidies and will be economically pinched
by the skyrocketing premiums.
In many parts of the country, the premium increases are worse than the Obama
administration lets on, as states like Georgia and Minnesota are projected to
have premium increases of 33 percent and 30 percent, respectively.
2. Deductibles are also increasing. According to CNBC, Obamacare's deductibles
are set to increase by an average of 17 percent for all silver plans and an
average of six percent for bronze plans. For the latter, the increase is slated
to be a whopping 21 percent for those who don't qualify for the subsidies.
Deductibles, of course, are the threshold people need to pay under their
insurance plans before they share the costs with their insurance companies, so
higher deductibles in addition to higher premiums both are major squeezes on
consumers.
3. There are a lack of insurance options under Obamacare. Seven states have only
one insurer providing insurance through Obamacare due to the fact that major
insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare and Aetna are all
leaving the exchanges because of unsustainability. As a result, there has been
less competition throughout the Obamacare exchanges, contributing to the rise of
premiums and deductibles and less consumer choice.
4. The co-ops are failing. There were 23 co-ops created under Obamacare and at
least 15 of them have gone under as a result of Obamacare's risk adjustment
program that compelled insurers with healthy customers to redistribute wealth
towards those with sicker customers. That's over $1.5 billion in taxpayer
dollars down the drain.
5. Obamacare's Medicaid expansion is a burden for states. Thirty-two states were
suckered into expand Medicaid under Obamacare, but the costs have been higher
than expected – a whopping 49 percent higher, to be exact. The higher costs are
due to the higher than expected enrollment numbers for Medicaid, as over 11.5
million have signed up for Medicaid in 24 states that only expected 5.5 million
signups.
"States that expanded Medicaid will either have to boost health costs, raise
taxes or cut spending to cover this ObamaCare 'freebie,'" the editors of
Investor's Business Daily wrote. "Given that Medicaid is already swamping state
budgets, this will not be good news."
This is especially true given that over the years, states will be left with
higher and higher Medicaid bills as the federal government won't pay as much for
it, and in doing so will drain state budgets.
6. Obamacare is resulting in higher wait times at the emergency room. Another
one of the side effects of the Medicaid expansion is that waiting times have
increased because fewer and fewer doctors are accepting Medicaid to avoid
dealing with the program's bureaucracy for less than satisfactory compensation,
forcing Medicaid patients to the emergency room to obtain a doctor. Without an
increase in doctors to offset the surge in demand due to Obamacare's mandates
and Medicaid expansion, longer wait times in the emergency room are the
unfortunate consequence.
7. Obamacare is also resulting in a shortage of primary doctors. A report from
the Association of American Medical Colleges found that America faces a
shortfall of 61,700 to 94,700 doctors over the next ten years, as less medical
residents plan on entering the field of primary care. Doctors have struggled to
keep up with the higher demand, as 81 percent of physicians surveyed by The
Physicians Foundation in 2012 were "over-extended or at full capacity" in terms
of their ability to seek new patients – a real problem when new doctors are not
entering the field. Obamacare seems to be a deterrent to new doctors entering
the field; 46 percent of doctors who have delt with the monstrous law rated it
as a "D" or an "F."
8. The number of Americans without insurance is set to skyrocket. As the Daily
Wire explains here, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that
the number of uninsured will increase to 26-28 million over the next ten years
as more employers opt to stop offering insurance plans.
9. Obamacare is worsening America's debt problem. According to National
Interest, "the single fastest-growing sector of federal spending is healthcare,"
and it's going to result in trillion-dollar deficits in seven years' time. The
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned that the debt could be as high as
$30 trillion by 2030, with Obamacare being one of the driving factors behind
that increase.
10. Obamacare's Independent Advisory Board (IPAB), more popularly known as the
"death panels," is still on the books. People seem to have forgotten about IPAB.
The House of Representatives actually passed a bill to repeal it in 2015, but it
is still law and could go into effect, creating a 15-member panel of experts
that rations Medicare through price controls and determining the type of care
that Medicare pays for. Whatever IPAB recommends becomes law if Congress cannot
garner a two-thirds majority vote to override it. Even worse, none of IPAB's
15-member panel can be fired by the president, and if the appointments are never
made, then the Department of Health and Human Services assumes the panel's power
– an alarming centralization of power. There is only a brief window in 2017 when
IPAB can be repealed, and if it's not, then in 2020 the panel's edicts will be
law, even if Congress attempts overrides them.
11. The Obama administration is illegally using funds to hide Obamacare's
losses. Per the Daily Wire:
The Obama administration used billions of dollars that were supposed to be used
for the U.S. Treasury and instead sent them to insurers, a move that both the
Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office have
ruled illegal. Naturally, the Obama administration is looking to tap into other
federal funds to pay off insurers to cover their losses, reflecting the dire
state of Obamacare.