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It may sound like I am beating a dead horse, but some issues deserve to be beat. ObamaCare is one of those issues. Anyone who has more of a brain than Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi knows ObamaCare is an ongoing train wreck. We don’t blame it on people not understanding how to navigate a website. Instead, we look at the facts of what is happening with the program. Americans are losing the health insurance plan they liked, in lieu of a health insurance plan that covers less, but costs more money. And all the while, the program continues to cost us billions of dollars, with no end in sight.
As I was doing some of my normal reading last weekend, I came across an article that highlights how ObamaCare is stuck in first gear and costing the American tax payers billions of dollars. It’s worth the read. The quote I have included below is partial, as I excluded the section that speaks specifically to the health insurance program established in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. Again, the entire article by John Hayward is well worth reading.
Human Events – Journalistic icon Bob Woodward has been in hot water with the Obama Administration and its more enthusiastic apologists for a while now. He’s not going to get any more popular with that crowd after his appearance on “Fox News Sunday” last weekend, in which he related a conversation with a doctor he described as a “very knowledgeable, very involved supporter of ObamaCare” who nevertheless described it as similar to “a car stuck in first gear.”
When Woodward asked this ObamaCare-supporting doctor when he thought second gear might kick in, the response was, “Honestly, years!” because, to continue the clunker car analogy, “the transmission is in the shop for repairs.”
Let us focus upon a very simple reason Romneycare could survive in Massachusetts – until the incompetence of Barack Obama and his team turned even that state into an ObamaCare nightmare – while the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work across the whole of the United States: money. ObamaCare is hideously expensive, and only a portion of the cost is borne by the inflated insurance premiums so many of its subjects are expected to pay. It’s the worst Cash for Clunkers scheme Obama has come up with yet – it’s costing us billions to get the ACA clunker into second gear. We can’t afford to spend more billions every year while bureaucrats fiddle with the clutch and gear shift, especially since ObamaCare’s critics – who have always understand the law far better than its supporters – think third gear will never kick in.
“After four years of implementation, countless delays, a website disaster, and constant litigation, the Affordable Care Act celebrates its inauspicious birthday this week,” says the introduction to a new study from the American Action Forum. ”From a regulatory perspective, the law has imposed more than $27.2 billion in total private sector costs, $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, and more than 159 million paperwork hours on local governments and affected entities. What’s more troubling, the law has generated just $2.6 billion in annualized benefits, compared to $6.8 billion in annualized costs. In other words, the ACA has imposed 2.5 times more costs than it has produced in benefits.”
159 million paperwork hours is more than double what the hideously complicated, economy-retarding Dodd-Frank law dumped on Americans – enough of a burden to keep eighty thousand people working 2,000 hours per year. Of course, Big Government liberals believe private-sector time is without value – you should be happy to spend hours expressing your patriotism by wrestling with mandatory paperwork! – but even government agencies, such as HHS and the Treasury, are paying for millions of hours of paper-shuffling due to the Affordable Care Act. Or, more to the point, they’re forcing you to pay for it by funding these bloated agencies, but at least they acknowledge the cost exists, unlike the private-sector compliance costs they try to obscure.
ObamaCare imposes costs far beyond paperwork compliance, of course. All those mandates, plus dozens of hidden taxes, siphon more billions out of the private economy. And all this for a law that has, thus far, actually increased the number of uninsured Americans! But even if the ACA survives and finally climbs into “second gear” one of these years, the meager potential increase in the insured population becomes utterly ridiculous when measured against the exorbitant cost. Instead of wasting billions and wrecking the insurance industry to give a handful of people access to lousy insurance policies with huge out-of-pocket costs, we could have bought every uninsured person in America circa 2008 a Cadillac health care plan for a fraction of the cost.
If the liberal supporters of ObamaCare would step back for a moment and look at their pet project with a critical eye, they should be able to see how badly the program is hurting Americans. The cost of implementation is already enormous and it isn’t even fully operational. Billions on top of billions of dollars are being added to the costs of the private sector health care industry and people like President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi expect us to swallow the lie that ObamaCare is working great? Sorry, my gag reflex will not allow that to go down.
Working in the automotive repair industry, I know for a fact that some cars need to be scrapped, not repaired. It’s too cost prohibitive to do anything else. ObamaCare is in the same category. All of the talk from some moderate Republicans about “fixing ObamaCare” is nonsense. We should have listened to Ted Cruz and Mike Lee when they tried to tell their colleagues ObamaCare needed to be repealed, not fixed. The costs keep rising, more health insurance plans are canceled, and the American taxpayer is left holding a bag empty because the government officials they elected have taken everything to finance a train wreck of epic proportions. And as Bob Woodward pointed out in his comments on Fox News, this wreck isn’t even in second gear yet. What is it going to cost when that happens?
Truly, elections do have consequences and we are learning those consequences are most expensive.