President Ronald Reagan once said that the most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Well, Dutch, it seems you were right, because government intervention into the health care system is going to harm everyone while trying to insure just a few.
Signed into law in March 2010, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was promised as a way to insure millions of Americans who didn’t previously have health insurance, while simultaneously keeping costs low for middle-class and low-wage earners.
Only those filthy rich, 1-percenters would see any increase in costs or new taxes.
Sound too good to be true?
If you responded “Yes,” I’d like to take a moment to thank you for engaging the higher thought processes of your brain.
What Obamacare will do is, firstly, tax anyone and everyone who does not purchase some form of health care. Who will that hurt exactly?
Young people, that’s who. Sure, we can stay on our parents’ coverage till we’re 26, but what do we do after? We’d still be pretty young, healthy and ostensibly broke from crippling student loan debt, but not quite impoverished enough for a government subsidy. Buying a health care plan probably won’t be in the cards for many of us, which normally would be fine, except now, we will be “taxed” for non-compliance at a rate of 2.5 percent of our income by 2016.
Employers have begun cutting workers’ hours now that they’re required to insure full-time employees. This has caused 88 percent of jobs added this year to be part-time, and has the potential to kill the 40-hour work week — the lifeblood of the middle class.
Hold on now, it gets even better. With this employer mandate, businesses will see an increase of $52 billion in additional taxes. Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf testified before the House of Representatives in 2011 that these taxes would result in 800,000 fewer jobs in the private sector.
So if you think 800,000 non-essential federal employees being temporarily furloughed is bad, this should make you want to rip your hair out.
Seniors will also share in the collective misfortune. Obamacare cut Medicare, a program that covers 49 million Americans, mostly seniors, by $716 billion. Medicare is already on track to insolvency by 2026, but this cut to the program will only increase costs for seniors.
Don’t think the states are getting out unscathed. With the expansion of people that can enroll in Medicaid, nothing less than your standard entitlement program, roughly 80 million people will be enrolled by 2019.
At LSU, we like to give Gov. Bobby Jindal a lot of flak, but I have to give him credit where it’s due, and his decision to not expand Medicaid in Louisiana was the right one. That would have been either more money out of resident’s pockets, or cuts in the budget from other programs, like, for example, higher education.
Aside from the federal income tax, in what has got to be the largest middle finger directed at U.S. citizens in history, Congress and their staffers will have their health care purchases from the Exchange subsidized up to about 72 percent by their employer: the taxpayers.
I’ll wait while that sinks in.
What we need is tax cuts in the medical industry to lower costs, tort reform to protect doctors from unnecessary lawsuits, portability of insurance so you can take your coverage with you when you change jobs and for insurance companies to be allowed to sell across state lines.
A maxim of free market economics is that competition drives down costs. Why not try it with health care?
Obamacare is set to increase the cost of health care across the board, kill jobs and penalize those that do not comply. It is a bridge too far for government intervention, and I applaud the GOP’s stand against it.