Obamacare Hits Middle Class Hard, Pricing Them Out of Insurance

While President Barack Obama emphasizes that it’s the wealthy who will help finance his healthcare reform, the middle class would get socked pretty hard too, says Scott Gottlieb, a physician and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Health reform will leave many of them newly priced out of a transformed market for health insurance, he says.

“The hardest hit won't be those earning more than $250,000 a year — the group that he (Obama) says needs to ‘pay their fair share,’" Gottlieb says.

“Rather, it's families whose combined annual income is around $100,000 who could be crushed under this plan,” he wrote in a recent New York Post opinion piece.

People at that income level make too much too qualify for subsidies under the Democrats’ reform plan, but probably too little to easily afford the expensive insurance that the plan requires them to buy, Gottlieb argues.

Many families who earn about $100,000 a year will have to purchase a policy costing an average of $14,700 for the mid-level, "silver" health plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office's estimates, he writes.

I heard wrong about age discrimination. The old use more health care than the young, the government is aware of that, and would allow, under Obamacare, health insurance companies
to charge the old more for health insurance because they use health care more.

I was right about gender discrimination. Women use more health care than men, in some age groups almost twice as much.

Currently, health insurance companies are free to charge women more for health insurance because they use more health care. Under Obamacare, health insurance companies would be forced to charge men as much as women even though men don’t use as much health care.

That’s income redistribution from men to women. Men would have to pay more for health insurance than they would in a free market, women would be paying less. Men would be subsidizing women.

I don’t understand the racial argument. Do minories currently consume more health care than whites? Are health insurance companies free to charge minorities more for health insurance because they use more health care? Does Obamacare make any changes in this regard?

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