is Obamacare meant to be fiscally irresponsible ?

dogtowner

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Mike makes some interesting observations

the closer one looks, th4e worse this legislation gets

Is ObamaCare Meant to Be Fiscally Irresponsible?

By Michael Cannon

The Obama administration has officially scrapped one of the two entitlement programs Congress created under Obamacare. The failure of the "CLASS Act" shows how the rest of that law threatens every American's private health insurance.

The idea behind CLASS was that the government would run a voluntary and self-sustaining insurance plan to help the disabled pay for long-term care, including nursing home care. It was doomed to fail, thanks to a special kind of government price control Congress imposed on the premiums.

Congress required CLASS to set each applicant's premiums according to the average applicant's risk of needing such long-term care, rather than her individual risk. But averaged premiums are only attractive to people with above-average risks. Since few people with below-average risks would enroll, the average premium would rise. That would encourage more people with below-average risks not to enroll, and the vicious cycle would continue until the program collapsed.

As it turns out, CLASS collapsed even before its 2012 start date. The same thing happened when Obamacare imposed the same sort of price controls on health insurance for children in September 2010: the markets for child-only coverage collapsed in a total of 17 states, and are slowly collapsing in even more.

Everyone with a rudimentary understanding of insurance saw this coming. The government's non-partisan actuaries warned of "a very serious risk" that CLASS would be "unsustainable." One wrote, "Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue."

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee called CLASS "a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of." An Obama administration official wrote, "Seems like a disaster to me." One of President Obama's own cabinet secretaries called the program "totally unsustainable" and echoed a presidential commission on fiscal responsibility by recommending it be "reformed or repealed."

In the face of this setback, Obamacare supporters are naturally declaring victory. Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic sees "vindication." Kevin Drum of Mother Jones proudly announces, "What happened here is that government worked exactly the way it ought to." The Washington Post's Ezra Klein instructs, "The CLASS experience should, if anything, make us more confident in the underlying law." It's hard to argue with such logic, but let's try.

Cohn agrees with government actuaries that voluntary, self-sustaining insurance plans "face a significant risk of failure" when government imposes these price controls. Yet he claims the CLASS Act's failure "strengthens the case" for the rest of the law because when Obamacare imposes those price controls on everyone's health insurance in 2014, it will also force low-risk people to buy that overpriced health insurance. It is a virtue, he argues, that Obamacare forces people to take what they consider a bad deal.

The law also tries to prevent the market from unraveling by using roughly half a trillion dollars of new tax revenue to subsidize people's premiums. It is a virtue, say supporters, that Obamacare raises taxes (amid high unemployment, no less) to encourage people to buy something they would not voluntarily purchase with their own money.

Obamacare inspires confidence in its supporters, then, because one part of the law throws a Hail Mary pass to prevent another part of the law from stripping Americans of the insurance that currently protects them from illness and impoverishment. Feel safer?

One of the law's biggest supporters offers reason to think the Hail Mary strategy won't work. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber projects the law will increase net premiums for six out of 10 people in Wisconsin's individual market by an average of 31 percent. (A study of Obamacare's impact on Ohio projected much larger premium increases for many individuals and businesses.) That is, low-risk people will still have plenty of reason to walk away. And insofar as the Hail Mary succeeds in delaying collapse, the growth in health insurance premiums will accelerate.

Klein writes, "One way of looking at the administration's [CLASS] decision is that it shows a commitment to fiscal responsibility." If so, then let's handle the rest of Obamacare exactly the same way. Congress should require Obamacare's health insurance provisions to be voluntary and self-sustaining, just like CLASS: no individual mandate, no taxpayer subsidies.

Or is fiscal irresponsibility part of the plan?
 
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Sometimes I ask the same question. Sometimes I can't believe that they are that stupid. Other times I think they are stupid like a fox. (to change the metaphor)

Did they think they could make it work if they just got it passed with lies and then raised taxes by a whole load later?

Did they just not ever care as long as statism prevailed?

What is most doubtful to me is that they thought it would pay for itself as written.
 
Sometimes I ask the same question. Sometimes I can't believe that they are that stupid. Other times I think they are stupid like a fox. (to change the metaphor)

Did they think they could make it work if they just got it passed with lies and then raised taxes by a whole load later?

Did they just not ever care as long as statism prevailed?

What is most doubtful to me is that they thought it would pay for itself as written.


I think they knew it was unsound but that the could ram throuhg the taxes later. But mainly they woukd kill the insurance biz which was the intent from the start.
 
Yes it will destroy health insurance by making more get it...the horror..

You want to destory it, get rid of it...you know and pay less per person like every other nation on earth.

Your system is great...if your rich, don't care about money, and don't care about other people.
 
Yes it will destroy health insurance by making more get it...the horror..

You want to destory it, get rid of it...you know and pay less per person like every other nation on earth.

Your system is great...if your rich, don't care about money, and don't care about other people.


glad you are honest enough to see that this is about the health insurance biz and not healthcare.
 
I think they knew it was unsound but that the could ram throuhg the taxes later. But mainly they woukd kill the insurance biz which was the intent from the start.

I am conflicted about that. The insurance industry signed on because they knew it would increase their customer base.

And it does appear that it is intended to move the country toward a government run system that might not include any room at the table for the existence of a private insurance industry.

The only way insurers could buy into that is if they knew a short term existence was there only hope. Maybe they just thought that with different administrations they would always continue to exist and the regulation of thei industry would be more favorable than unfavorable to them. Either way we should all, left included, be suspicious of their support of the obama plan.
 
Yes it will destroy health insurance by making more get it...the horror..
100% of the population has health care so who benefits when more people get insurance?
You want to destory it, get rid of it...you know and pay less per person like every other nation on earth.

There is no guarantee that even if the US adopted the system of the most cost efficient country out there that it would work as well here. In fact there are plenty of reasons to think that it would not.

Not only that but we don't actually know that health care is cheaper in other countries. the data is convoluted and misrepresented by both our politicians and theirs.
Your system is great...if your rich, don't care about money, and don't care about other people.

The present system works best when rich do care about money as they do, and when all of us do care about people as we do. The main problem as I see it is that congress interfered and messed it up.
 
I am conflicted about that. The insurance industry signed on because they knew it would increase their customer base.

And it does appear that it is intended to move the country toward a government run system that might not include any room at the table for the existence of a private insurance industry.

The only way insurers could buy into that is if they knew a short term existence was there only hope. Maybe they just thought that with different administrations they would always continue to exist and the regulation of thei industry would be more favorable than unfavorable to them. Either way we should all, left included, be suspicious of their support of the obama plan.


its possible that they think the work will get outsourced to them as that gives the pols that money they crave AND the power. win win and lose for we the people.
 
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Since Obamacare’s Passage, Millions Have Lost Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance
4:42 PM, NOV 11, 2011 • BY JEFFREY H. ANDERSON

Throughout the Obamacare debate, President Obama repeatedly promised, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Now, Gallup reports that from the first quarter of 2010 (when Obama signed Obamacare into law) to the third quarter of this year, 2 percent of American adults lost their employer sponsored health insurance. In other words, about 4.5 million Americans lost their employer-sponsored insurance over a span of just 18 months.

This is not what the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had predicted would happen. Rather, the CBO had predicted that Obamacare would increase the number of people with employer-sponsored insurance by now. It had predicted that, under Obamacare, 6 million more Americans would have employer-sponsored insurance in 2011 than in 2010 (see table 4, which shows the CBO’s projected increase of 3 million under (pre-Obamacare) current law and an additional 3 million under Obamacare). So the CBO’s rosy projections for Obamacare (and even these paint a frightening picture) are already proving false.

Whether the decline in employer-sponsored insurance over the past 18 months is a product of Obamacare or of the Obama economy — and whether Obamacare is the principal cause of the anemic performance of the Obama economy — can be debated. But what’s clear is that, more than 25 months before Obamacare would really go into effect — if it’s not repealed first — employers are already dropping employees from their insurance rolls.

Take Walmart, for example — a prominent Obamacare supporter. Gallup writes,

“The nation's largest private employer, Wal-Mart, announced in October that new part-time employees who work less than an average of 24 hours a week would no longer be able to get their health insurance from the company. Wal-Mart laid out several other cuts to its health insurance offerings, including some workers’ ability get coverage for their spouses. Other companies have already made and will likely continue to make similar changes to their health insurance benefits….

“If Wal-Mart's decision is a precursor of how employers intend to manage their healthcare costs, the downward trend in employer-based healthcare will likely continue.”

So in addition to costing about $2.5 trillion over its real first decade (2014 to 2023), looting nearly $1 trillion from Medicare over that time (according to the CBO), forcing Americans to buy government-approved health insurance under penalty of law, and amassing unprecedented power and money in Washington at the expense of Americans’ liberty — if Obamacare stays on the books, you may like your health care plan, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can keep your health care plan.

It’s time to repeal Obamacare.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-s-passage-millions-have-lost-employer-sponsored-health-insurance_607994.html

So, we know that Obama, Dems, and the CBO lied about the effect this awful plan would have on Americans...so as to deceive Americans and get this socialist plan passed.

I wonder if this Gallup report will be reported on any of the TV networks or any major news outlets.

If the truth of Obamacare were readily reported, its approval rate would be in the single digits...IMO.
 
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