Watching the Collapse of Obamacare

People all over the world are convinced that Obamacare was a wise and needed change to the American health care delivery system. They, being captive in state-run health care delivery systems, have never experienced and cannot understand that America’s health care delivery system worked before Obama butted in and it will work again after his disastrous attempt at a government monopoly in health care delivery has disappeared. The world sees the 40 million uninsured and says America is heartless. They cannot understand that allocating available health care money centrally in their own countries often kills their friends and family members by the necessary allocation of services, and that the ageing public infrastructures in Europe are less and less able to provide any reasonably timely health care service at all.

And, we are beginning in America to see Obamacare unravel.

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, appointed by Obama, wrote to Congress to tell them, “Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.”

CLASS - the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program - was supposed to enroll healthy working Americans in a program to provide about $50 per month to pay for extras after they retired and presumably needed more professional health care services, such as home nursing and more expensive drugs. The program was also supposed to take $80 Billion off federal health care delivery system costs in the next decade. The problem was that healthy working age American, already burdened with high health care costs, didn’t think it was a good idea and few expressed the intention to sign up. When the financial analysis models were run, the monthly premium was estimated at anything from $100 to $350 per month. That, dear readers, is a “no-go.” And, so Secretary Sebelius has effectively stopped work on trying to develop it as a component of Obamacare.

At the same time, we have seen the buy-insurance-or-be-taxed provisions lose in federal appellate courts, and the US Supreme Court will soon be forced to decide if Obama’s buy-or-be-taxed method to pay for his Obamacare passes constitutional muster.

There are also the inconvenient matters of:

1. The Senate repeal in February of the 1099 provision in the bill that required companies to complete IRS paperwork each time they purchased $600 worth of goods from any vendor (there are already more than 10,000 waivers to this requirement);
2. The House voted Thursday to block public expenditures of taxpayer dollars on abortion-related services via taxpayer-subsidized health policies;
3. The growing whispers in Washington that the creation of federal health-insurance exchanges are so far behind schedule that they may not be ready when the full program takes effect in 2014.

That is not a very good record and the fault lies squarely in two places: with the White House for pushing through Congress the Obamacare bill in such fast forward that, in fact, most members voted for it without ever reading it; and with Congress for passing something as important as a drastic overhaul of the American health care delivery system because they were acting in a partisan fashion to support the President of their own Democrat Party and because they were bullied by his people into agreeing quickly.

Many experts have said this and I say it again, with experience in services delivery when I was a Deputy Assistant Secretary in HHS under President Reagan :

1. There is nothing wrong with the American health care system that tighter cost negotiation and national insurance markets won’t solve.

2. There is no one, not Democrats or Republicans, who do not want to provide health care for those now uninsured (if they are in the United States legally), but not at the expense of changing the vast majority of the system that works, and not by making the federal government its monopoly provider.

Obamacare is a non-starter because it was ill-conceived, badly drafted and ran roughshod over American law and voter sentiment.

That is what a “no- go” is and Mr. Obama should have known better.