To quote Jack Lew, President Obama’s Chief of Staff – on This Week and Meet the Press (6/30/2012), the Affordable Care Act is going to “give” middle class Americans –
- Insurance for kids up to age 26
- Coverage for pre-existing conditions
- No Life-time caps on benefits
- Tax credits worth $4000 a year
- Closure of Medicare Prescription “Doughnut Hole”
Who/what is going to pay for all these things the government is “giving” away??
- Businesses, who bear the major cost of health care for the insured
- Taxpayers, who bear 100% of the cost of Medicaid and 70 to 80% of the cost of Medicare.
- Patients whose insurance plans will pay the new $500B in taxes on medical devices, etc..
- The insured, who after 2018 still have plans that include extras like vision care –
- The insured, who will continue to pay for uncompensated care provided to illegal immigrants.
Speaking of business.
- Big American companies – i.e. Ford, GM, Cisco, etc.. – all self–insure.
- For them, paying the $2000 per employee penalty may make good business sense – even if it creates some pressure for high wages??
- Imagine the bottom-line cost for life-time, un-capped coverage for only 1% of their employee populations – tens of millions of dollars/year? Forcing a choice —
- R and D — new products?
- Or long-term health care benefit payments?
- Courts may consider it employment discrimination not to hire a qualified candidate who has a dependent requiring life-time care – ?
- For small employers, one big claim can result in unaffordable premium increases –
- How many employees will qualify for subsidies in insurance exchanges, as a result?
Voters are instinctively suspicious of the Affordable Health Care Act – just like any “free lunch”!
We don’t need a vote in Congress to repeal the Act.
We need a far-reaching national debate about how to replace it with something that works –
- Easily understood and equally applied to all
- Preserves individual freedom and choice
- Fosters innovation in medicine and care delivery
- Simple to administer
- Paid for from day one.
Let’s acknowledge the nonsense about “giving”anything to anyone.
Entitled does not mean free!!
