Posted on 11/11/2019 5:56:17 AM PST by karpov
Most Democratic presidential candidates are supporting some version of Medicare for All, a radical proposal to put Washington in complete control of the health-care system. Joe Biden, however, promises to “protect and build on the Affordable Care Act,” the last Washington health-care experiment, which is better known as ObamaCare.
Yet ObamaCare largely failed in its primary goal—to create a better market for individual health insurance. The ObamaCare exchanges are performing much worse than expected when they were launched in 2014. And this has nothing to do with the Trump administration. Rather, the law failed because of its perverse construction.
Most damaging were regulations that mandated a long list of expensive benefits while fixing rates. Premiums must be identical for people of the same age regardless of their health; young people pay inflated premiums; and older couples are forced to purchase pediatric dental coverage, for example. Result: Premiums more than doubled by 2017.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2014 that there would be 25 million enrollees covered in the exchanges in 2019. The actual figure is about 10 million. People who don’t qualify for huge subsidies or who aren’t sick don’t find value from the products. Exchange enrollment has stabilized, but only because of the subsidies. The number of unsubsidized enrollees in the individual market dropped from 9.4 million to 5.2 million between 2015 and 2018.
The exchanges have become a high-risk pool for lower-income people with a limited selection of plans, most of which exclude top doctors and facilities. From 2017 to 2018, families making more than three times the poverty line (around $75,000) were the only income group with a significant overall coverage loss.
The left has accused the Trump administration of sabotaging ObamaCare. In reality it took steps to stop the bleeding.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
That whole "...performing much worse than expected..." thing applies to just about everything the leftists try to do. They have all these ideas that sound wonderful, but in reality they never achieve their stated goals - though they may achieve their real goals of increasing control and power. But to the casual observer, they all just look like failures, performing worse than expected. Unintended consequences seems to be a phrase lost on the left.
...the law failed because of its perverse construction.
Disagree. The law failed because the entire concept is flawed - government/centralized control. The ****-poor implementation is just a side effect of the left's ineptitude.
Today, government is like your stomach with bleeding ulcers and stomach cancer.
Ok but they’re not inept. We are to pretend they are ruling instead of what
they are actually doing. What they are doing is taking our money. When they campaign they talk about taking Their audience is impressed by this. Their audience is not whom they are targeting, they have no money and no intention of giving money. The dem voters, along with Biden, want to take our money, freedom and property - and not within the confines of any constitution.
Of course all their plans fail to help Americans. The Bidens have billions and access to billions. Ditto Clinton’s and the Martha’s Vineyard Obama’s - 6 bil missing from the pentagon
Some girls can smell a predator inches away, Sniffer.
Obamacare was meant to fail miserably so people would clamor for a single-payer government system. Ted Kennedy (who has been sober for over 10 years now, I believe) laid out this strategy decades ago. He said that the left’s intent was to ruin the current system, so dolts would think the only alternative was a national health care system.
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