Obamacare : Higher Premiums, Lower Wages, Fewer Jobs, and Funded Abortions

Because of the current worries about ISIS and the Middle East, one key November election issue has been pushed onto rhe back burner. OBAMACARE. Remember President Obama's 3,000-page law designed to destroy the American healthcare system? Well, it's still there, taking more of your money as premiums, delivering fewer doctors, hospitals and services, and spending your tax dollars to subsidize the premiums to the tune of nearly $1 trillion between now and 2024. Here are some of the current news about Obamacare. ~~~~~ When he signed the Obamacare bill into law President Obama promised Americans that it would not cover abortions - even signing an executive order to that effect. But a new GOA report shows that he misled America. Despite Obama's promise to awmakers and the American public in a special joint session of Congress on healthcare reform that “under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion,” a new report released by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) today documents massive public funding of abortion in Obamacare. Among GAO’s findings, every Obamacare taxpayer-subsidized health insurance plan in New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island and Hawaii pays for abortion on demand. In New York, 405 out of 426 Obamacare plans subsidize abortion on demand, in California, 86 of 90, in Massachusetts 109 0f 111, in Oregon 92 of 102, in Washington DC 23 of 34. A Health and Human Services Department official confirmed that the law requires issuers to collect separate payments for abortion-related costs, but said that the law doesn’t specify how. Critics of the dual payment track have long questioned the arrangement. saying that it is essentially inoperable. If a plan wants to cover abortion, it has to estimate the cost of coverage - no less than $1 per enrollee, per month - and collect that money from customers in a separate way than via their tax subsidies. Then, the pots of money have to remain separate. Nationally, 1,062 plans in 28 states only cover abortion in the cases of rape, incest or to preserve the mother’s life, and 1,036 plans cover abortion services in a wider variety of circumstances, the GAO report said. Another Obamacare lie uncovered. ~~~~~ Forbes reports that Democrats are trumpeting estimates indicating that Ovamacare exchange insurance premiums will rise on average in 2015. If, as we should, we measure Obamacare by looking at the underlying affordability of American health care, there can be no doubt that health care today is more costly than it would have been without Obamacare. Last week, McKinsey released its preliminary rate filings for 2015. McKinsey looked at the premium of the lowest-priced Silver plan in 2015, and compared that to the premium of the lowest-priced Silver plan in 2014. This is useful because Obamacare insurance subsidies are geared to the cost of Silver plans, and because 65% of those selecting plans this past year chose Silver plans. McKinsey found that the premium of the lowest-priced Silver plan increased by an average of 8% in 2015. That’s slightly above the PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) 2015 medical inflation estimate of 6.8%. In other words, Obamacare plans on average aren’t bending down the cost curve - they’re bending it slightly upward. PwC, using a different methodology than McKinsey to estimate 2015 exchange premiums, calculates the average 2015 premium rate increase as 7%. Another study in nine states from Avalere Health pegs the average rate increase at 8%. It’s important to emphasize that these rate increases are preliminary, because each state’s insurance commissioner - and also the federal government - must approve proposed rate increases before they are enacted. Because government agencies almost always try to jawbone insurers into going easy on rate increases, we could see a somewhat lower increase than the preliminary numbers indicate - but prices keep going up. Measured over two years, Obamacare’s rate hikes remain toxic. And further increases are on the horizon in 2017, when some of the law’s subsidies to insurance companies are set to expire. Contrary to Paul Krugman and other ACA cheerleaders, rate shock isn’t a myth. It’s a fact. The Manhattan Institute looked at the actual, finalized rate filings in 2014 and compared them to what was available in 2013 and found an average US county rate increase of 49%. But, Obamacare’s $2 trillion in subsidies cushions the impact of rate shock for those whose incomes are low enough to qualify them. That’s why 85% of those who signed up for exchange-based plans last spring were people eligible for subsidies. Obamacare isn’t out of the woods by any means. Insurers are extremely nervous about the fact that much of the Obamacare website’s “back end” - the part that processes subsidy eligibility and payments, among other things - remains a mess. Earlier this summer, the US Government Accountability Office entered 12 fake applications into the federal exchanges, and found that 11 of them were approved. Importantly, a set of Obamacare exchange provisions called the “ three Rs” - risk adjustment, reinsurance, and risk corridors - encourage insurers to offer premiums on the exchanges that are imprudently low. If you are an insurance company, and you lose money because your premiums were lower than your actual claim costs, Obamacare subsidizes that loss for you. It’s this part of the law that Senator Marco Rubio and others have been calling a “bailout” of participating insurers. The problem is that the “three Rs” are transitional. Reinsurance and risk corridors expire at the end of 2016, at which point insurance companies like Aetna, Humana, and Cigna will have to charge premiums in line with their costs. That may lead to a spike in premiums in 2017. insurance companies heavily lobbied Obama's right hand advisor Valerie Jarrett this year to spend more on the “three R” subsidies, threatening substantial rate hikes if they weren’t accommodated. They were accommodated. So, the story is more complicated than either side would like you to believe. Premiums on Obamacare exchanges are rising 7-8% for 2015. Premiums rose a lot in 2014. And they may go up again in 2017, as the “three R” program phases out. The bottom line is that if you shop for coverage on your own, and you don’t qualify for Obamacare subsidies, you’re probably paying a lot more for insurance today than you did before And that’s one reason Obamacare remains unpopular with the public. ~~~~~ Fox News reports a finding by several regional Federal Reserve Banks that businesses are cutting jobs due to Obamacare. Health economist John Goodman noted that "three Federal Reserve Banks in Philadelphia, New York and Atlanta have surveyed people in their area and roughly 20% of the employers are saying they cut back on employment: “Roughly one fifth are saying they're moving from full time to part time,” Goodman added. “More than one in ten say they're doing more outsourcing - all this because of the new health care reform." Doug Holtz-Eakin, former Director of the Congressional Budget Office, said, “for the smaller employers - those that have between 20 and 49 employees - you get a negative impact on jobs, you get a negative impact on wages in those jobs. What this means for small business as a whole is that over $22 billion of earnings are gone for their workers and 350,000 jobs." Small business is responsible for the vast majority of job creation in the US. While Obama has delayed the mandate requiring businesses with more than 50 employees to provide insurance, businesses know it's coming, so many avoid hiring to keep their worker rolls below 50. Also, the mandate applies only to those who work more than 30 hours a week - an incentive for employers to reduce hours. "The 30-hour cutoff is how the administration determines whether you're full time or part time," Goodman said. "And so we see this everywhere, that people are restricted, they're pushed below 30 hours, they count as part time and when they're part time, the employer doesn't have to provide health insurance." More than a third of manufacturing firms in the NY Fed survey said they're raising prices to cover the costs of health care, and about half the businesses surveyed by the Dallas Fed said Obamacare is raising insurance costs for their employees, but employers don’t just take that lying down," said Tevi Troy of the American Health Policy Institute. Goodman added, "Even among full-time workers, take home pay is going to go down because one thing that almost all the employers are doing in response to Obamacare is raising the deductibles, raising the co-payments and making the employee pay more of the premium." ~~~~~ Dear readers, don't let Mr. Obama lull you into forgetting about Obamacare. When you vote this November, remember the Obamacare disaster. Vote only for candidates committed to "repeal and replacement." Nothing -- not even ISIS -- is more important for America's future.