Posted on 01/14/2011 9:09:53 AM PST by Signalman
Re: Lois Capps’ Jan. 9 commentary, “The numbers don’t lie: Healthcare reform law is helping California”:
Allowing children with rare diseases to maintain coverage, extending coverage to young adults to age 26, eliminating lifetime coverage caps and pre-existing condition limitations and giving free preventive care certainly sound like good provisions.
The “free” mandates in the new healthcare bill are not free, the expansion of coverage comes at a cost which is reflected in premiums. Premiums are escalating out of control at an unsustainable rate. I have renewals for five companies’ group health plans on my desk; the annual rate increases are 13 percent, 28 percent, 28 percent, 18 percent and 20 percent.
Rep. Capps states small business tax cuts have given relief to 80 percent of small businesses. My clients are mostly small businesses, about 5 percent are eligible for the tax cuts.
What Rep. Capps does not address is how the bill plans to pay for this escalating cost and expand coverage to the uninsured. This is done through a mandate that businesses (with more than 50 employees) cover the cost of their employees’ healthcare in 2014, or face a “penalty” of $2,000 per employee per year. This will put some companies out of business, others will begin making choices of who to lay off.
The individual mandate (requiring everyone not covered by an employer’s plan to purchase coverage) is key in eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions for people purchasing individual coverage, effective 2014. The penalty for not buying coverage is $325 in 2015, going to $695 in 2016. With the cost of individual coverage running about $5,000 a year, people will risk paying the penalty instead of purchasing coverage, then buy it when they need it.
This will destroy the insurance companies’ risk pools and rates will go into the stratosphere. This may be the end of healthcare as we know it, which may be the ultimate goal of the new law, giving us no choice but government-run healthcare. This dumps the problem on taxpayers, with the plan manager being the government, the one that “manages” our $14,025,346,941,382 national debt (increasing by $4.18 billion per day). Future costs would ultimately result in diminished care or higher taxes.
This is a horrendous problem; the healthcare reform law does not address the root cause, escalating costs. The healthcare reform bill is detrimental to business and our economy and creates more problems than it solves.
Dear me! Allowing reason and reality to intrude on the discussion. That’s Un-American and probably amounts to incendiary hate speech. We must emote! We must be empathetic! Thought is bad!
Obamacare was designed to destroy the private insurance companies leaving the government as the only insurer. It is part of the plan to have a single payer only.
Since the government is bankrupt and won’t be able to pay for anyone’s health treatment, it appears that the real goal was destruction of the finest medical industry on the globe.
BHO hates America and Americans.
The "free" mandates in the new healthcare bill are not free, the expansion of coverage comes at a cost which is reflected in premiums. Premiums are escalating out of control at an unsustainable rate. I have renewals for five companies' group health plans on my desk; the annual rate increases are 13 percent, 28 percent, 28 percent, 18 percent and 20 percent.
Kudos to Nancy Miller. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of her.
Harry Reid’s Medicare Mess
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/12/harry-reid-medicare-mess
This from a commie rag no less.
Sounds a lot like Sally Pipes.
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