Egads! According to leftist media pundits, President Trump’s new moves to begin repealing the textbook fascist insurance law known as “Obamacare” will cause people to die!
Medical doctor, astrophysicist, and internationally renowned economist Bernie “Ben and Jerry’s” Sanders told the word on Jan. 24 that if “Obamacare” (Care? Really?) is repealed, “36,000 people will die as a result.”
Don’t let cause-and-effect hit you in the rear on your way to what one hopes is a rapidly approaching retirement in one of your three expensive homes, Sanders.
Not to be outdone, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woodhandler saw Sanders’ bet and raised it to 43,000 in an editorial carried by such reliable papers as the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.
But Trump has heard the pleas of people who’ve seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket. On Feb. 14, he issued an Executive Order telling the IRS not to require people to fill in the forbidding “Line Six” on their tax returns, which originally mandated them to show proof of health insurance.
The next day, newly sworn-in Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price (a former GOP congressman from Georgia and a medical doctor) released details of the changes in how Obamacare will be administered.
Here’s a review:
Despite Trump’s Executive Order, the mandate to get health insurance still exists -- it simply won’t be enforced by the IRS. However, since the government forces insurers to accept people with preexisting conditions (one of the more pernicious government orders on business in U.S. history, and the main reason premiums exploded like supernovae in all the states that applied similar mandates prior to Obamacare), and since such so-called “Guaranteed Issue” mandates incentivize young people to get their policies after they get sick, rates run the risk of shooting up even faster if people aren’t forced by the loveable feds to buy it.
Price’s temporary answer is to shorten the time window for folks to buy insurance. People who don’t get insurance from an employer will have six weeks, rather than three months, to buy during the “open enrollment” period. People who drop out of their plans before the year is over would have to repay the last premiums they missed if they want to go back to the same insurer later.
Additionally, Price’s Obamacare changes would see a decrease in the guaranteed coverage for the “silver” group in the “Obamacare Exchanges” (subsidization currently stands at 70% of an insured’s costs), thus raising out-of-pocket payments for that group.
Just as Sanders and the editorialists for the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post lament, this might actually require some people to syphon less off of others and actually pay for their own health care.
Unless the “Guaranteed Issue” mandate (which is not a power granted the feds in the Constitution) is repealed, young people will continue to wait to get their insurance, leaving relatively sicker people in the pools of insureds and causing rates to shoot to the moon.
As rates rise, and as more companies exit the Obamacare “Exchanges” (Humana just announced that it is leaving), Trump's actions to negate unconstitutional and destructive mandates are laudable and big first steps. But the heart of the Obamacare monster continues to beat. It will cause rates to go up and up unless it is stopped, and, unfortunately, there appears to be little desire on the part of the majority in the House and Senate, or in the Trump Administration, to fully restore freedom to health insurance providers or sellers.