Will the Koch Brothers Save Obamacare?

American Prospect ^ | 3/15/2017 | Eliza Newlin Carney

[scooby321]

The health-care lobby is out in force again, but this time the allegiances are scrambled and unpredictable.

rogressives campaigning to defend Barack Obama’s signature health-care law may find their biggest assist comes from the unlikeliest of allies: the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch and their conservative network.

[scooby321]

The Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity, having spent tens of millions to oppose the Affordable Care Act, is now gearing up to throw more big money behind a campaign to block congressional Republicans’ health-care replacement bill. Deep-pocketed conservative groups such as the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and Heritage Action for America have also panned the House GOP health-care plan, and are mounting an aggressive counter-attack.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Highly possible.

Wide swaths of our business community want nothing more than to shove their employees’ health care costs onto somebody else’s balance sheet.

[Redwood71]

Obama has touted the Affordable Care Act as a way to save money on health care costs. New projections from the Congressional Budget Office, however, anticipate that the federal government will need to spend more on Obamacare than previously thought.

The non-partisan office estimates that the program will cost the federal government $1.34 trillion over the next decade, an increase of $136 billion from the CBO’s predictions since the law’s inception for 2015. In 2016 alone, Obamacare cost a total of $110 billion.

The rising costs are likely caused by higher-than-expected enrollment in the expanded Medicaid program created under the law. The CBO also estimates that about 12 million people are currently covered through Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces this year. The program was expected to reduce the number of uninsured people by 22 million in 2016.

The CBO also projects that costs will rise for those enrolled in Obamacare. For those who are already insured, insurance premiums will jump by about 6% a year over the next decade.

Meanwhile, the number of people enrolled under employment-based coverage—the most popular type—is expected to decline in the next decade. Employers now cover about 155 million people, or about 57% of those under age 65. That figure is expected to decrease to 54% of those under 65. That’s because some workers may qualify for Medicaid, a far less expensive program.

Other employers—those not large enough to be fined for not offering insurance—may decide not to offer Obamacare. Still, employment-based coverage will remain the most popular kind of coverage under the ACA, the report found.

But, as unemployment varies over the next 10 years as it has during the last 8. it will cause the company based enrollment to be inconsistent and will force more draining of earmarked medicare and social security funds substituting one deficit for another, a historical action from the libs starting in the 1960’s.

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[hans56]

I really want to see my liberal friends support Koch.
Funny how I was told for the last 8 years there would be no tea party without their funding.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Much of the business community wants single payer thinking someone else will eat their health care costs. At one time Trump was one of them.

[Wolfie]

Indeed, it’s Corporate America’s biggest dream. I think the mandate was a delicate balance between the lobbyists on K Street set up as a prelude to employers dumping health coverage while maintaining health insurance industry profits by forcing people to buy it once they couldn’t get it from their job.

[meyer]

Corporate America isn’t middle America. It isn’t employee America. It isn’t small business America. It isn’t retired America, student America, or anything else America. Except Corporate America. And when Corporate America gets too friendly with Political America it becomes Oligarchy America.

[sagar]

Let me get this straight — opposing the current RINOcare is siding with Obamacare? Those who oppose RINOcare (about to become TrumpCare) want FULL REPEAL instead of polishing the Obamacare turd attempt by the GOP.

[Redwood71]

Many times I have said that Trump is a mixture of about all of the major political figures since the 50’s. I was around when the government run health care system was on the blackboard and getting tossed. It wasn’t until Clinton’s administration when the libs woke up to the fact that if they control healthcare, they can call all the shots. They already had education. So they murdered the doctors and their efforts to cut costs in the media until, after many years, they finally BS’ed their way into the Health Care Act by thrashing the conservatives into the “they don’t care about you” point of view in the media every day and every source. At that point, they took a step closer to socialism.

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