Posted on 06/04/2015 5:36:51 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When Barack Obama and Democrats on Capitol Hill first rolled out ObamaCare, conservatives warned that the program was so badly designed that it couldn’t possibly be on the level. Instead, people assumed that Democrats intended ObamaCare to fail — so that the only possible choice would be a single-payer system of socialized medicine. Even after Democrats reluctantly eliminated the “public option,” opponents insisted that the intended end game was failure so bad that it would destroy private insurance and leave nothing but the federal government to pick up the pieces.
The problem with that strategy, if indeed that was the plan, is apparent in Vermont. Before ObamaCare, the state was headed toward a popular single-payer plan. The utter flop of ObamaCare has killed that dream, perhaps forever:
Just a few years ago, lawmakers in this left-leaning state viewed President Obama’s Affordable Care Act as little more than a pit stop on the road to a far more ambitious goal: single-payer, universal health care for all residents.
Then things unraveled. The online insurance marketplace that Vermont built to enroll people in private coverage under the law had extensive technical failures. The problems soured public and legislative enthusiasm for sweeping health care changes just as Gov. Peter Shumlin needed to build support for his complex single-payer plan. Finally, Mr. Shumlin, a Democrat, shelved the plan in December, citing the high cost to taxpayers. He called the decision “the greatest disappointment of my political life.” …
But even though its residents’ subsidies appear safe for now, Vermont stands as a cautionary tale. Despite an eventual cost of up to $200 million in federal funds, its online marketplace, or exchange, is still not fully functional, while disgust with the system is running deep among residents and lawmakers alike.
Meanwhile, the hopes for a single-payer system, once tantalizingly close, may be lost for years. Under such a system, the government operates one health insurance plan for all residents, covering their medical costs instead of having private insurers do it.
Single-payer backers in Vermont, Shumlin among them, tried to blame the mess on the insurers, claiming that the involvement of the private sector is what created the ObamaCare mess. Consumers forced to use the state exchange know better. Despite having more than two years and hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the government-run part of ObamaCare, it’s still a disaster. Normal changes to coverage take weeks to accomplish rather than the few minutes it would take if dealing directly with insurers. Premiums have gone up and so have deductibles, which means that more people may have insurance, but they will get less out of it in the end.
This was always the flaw in the supposed Trojan-horse theory of ObamaCare. The government takeover of the markets was too pronounced, too obvious, to leave government with any credibility in the event of its failure. Most opponents thought that the failure would come within a few years as the result of its impossible financial model. Few would have predicted that the federal government and the states could have failed so spectacularly on building the exchanges themselves, or that those failures would still be continuing into 2015.
The financial-model failure is coming, though:
ObamaCare exchanges have just met a target of 2.8 million young-adult enrollees. The bad news: That target was for last year.
By now, there were supposed to have been roughly 5 million paying customers between the ages of 18 and 34. Lagging young-adult enrollment is among the reasons why so many big insurers on the exchanges are seeking premium hikes of 20% or more for 2016. …
If enrollment had kept up with independent projections, there should have been 4.8 million to 5.2 million young-adult members.
In other words, 18- to 34-year-old enrollment has fallen short by about 2 million to 2.4 million, or more than 40%.
Meanwhile, the number of people age 55 and over who have joined the exchanges is 29% above forecasts.
There are 1.1 young adult enrollees for every member age 55+. That young-to-old ratio was supposed to be 2.4-to-1.
The sharp premium increases coming for 2016 coverage are being driven in part by these numbers. The death spiral has well and truly begun, and it won’t be long before it takes out the dream of socialized medicine with it.
A story with a happy ending.
I just hope it is not fiction.
I still see calls for single payer from the very same crowd who supported and pushed obamacare on us. The people who fed us all those promises of fixes and miracles via obamacare are the very same people now making the same promises, bigger and better promises, in their support of single payer.
In the immortal words of Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, surprise, surprise!”
How can single payer even be seriously considered with the joke that the VA system has been?
Obamacare is what happens when you do it in secret
BFLR
The same inverted demographic pyramid as the Social Security Ponzi.
You m ean like the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement?
I guess that qualifies Bernie Sanders to run for president. Maybe he can get Jonathan Gruber to be his campaign manager.
$200 million for a tiny state.
Vermont population 626,562 in 2014
California 38 million.
For the USA it is around 320 million.
Someone do the math and find how much it would cost for everyone. Figure $400 million per million population to round off. Plus extra cost for the Clinton Healthcare Foundation.
400 million x 320 million
400,000,000 x 320,000,000
million x million = one trillion
$128,000,000,000,000 or there about?!
[Meanwhile, the number of people age 55 and over who have joined the exchanges is 29% above forecasts.
There are 1.1 young adult enrollees for every member age 55+. That young-to-old ratio was supposed to be 2.4-to-1.]
Bwahahaha. Who could have EVER seen this coming?
And there are people out there still claiming Obama is “smart”. No, he’s an idiot.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you smile.
Arithmetic is a bitch.
Too bad the American Electorate can’t add and subtract.
Big government is sold to us based on intentionally unrealistic forecasts, ranging from the Space Shuttle’s cost-effective “one launch per month per shuttle” to Obamacare’s “save $2500 per family”. It’s always a lie, and low-information voters need to learn to automatically reject big government solutions.
something like that
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