As we mark the second anniversary of President Obama’s new healthcare law, there’s not much to celebrate. Obamacare has already inflicted heavy consequences on the economy, doctors, patients, businesses, and taxpayers — and there’s much more to come. It has yet to even take full effect.
Now, it goes without saying that imposing additional taxes on American families and businesses hurts investment, savings, job creation, and our struggling economy. But Obamacare does just that, inflicting more than $500 billion in new taxes; it increases taxes on medical devices and prescription drugs, levies a $32 billion excise tax for individuals and families with so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans (and many of these plans are anything but), and even imposes billions in taxes on tanning services.
Doctors, struggling with the already ballooning cost of practicing medicine, will now have to contend with even more regulatory compliance. We have the best doctors in the world, but many prospective doctors will simply decide to enter different fields if the cost of practicing medicine keeps rising. In fact, in just over a decade, the U.S. will experience an estimated shortage of up to 160,000 physicians.
Obamacare also raises costs dramatically for patients. The administration promised that Obamacare would lower premiums for the average family by $2,500, but Kaiser found that average family premiums have actually risen by $2,213 since Obama took office. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that several of the law’s mandates will raise premiums even further – by as much as $2,100 per family.
And, because Obamacare has made employer-sponsored health insurance so expensive, many employers are simply deciding to drop their employees’ coverage With these employees then left to buy inferior health insurance on their own, those receiving subsidized healthcare from the federal government is estimated to rise to 19 million people by 2019, at a cost of $460 billion to taxpayers.
The law’s higher healthcare costs simply discourage small and large businesses from growing, and Obamacare’s requirement — under a $2,000 per employee non-compliance penalty — that businesses must purchase healthcare plans for their employees certainly gives these companies no incentive to bring on new employees. Indeed, many will simply choose to drop their employees’ coverage, pay the fine, and then raise wages to compensate for the loss of benefits; this is because many businesses would still come out ahead than if they offered employer-sponsored insurance. It’s the natural outcome of these Obamacare policies – and it’s not right.
At the end of the day, employees will be left with lower-quality coverage and taxpayers will be left to foot the bill in the form of subsidies for their new, sub-premium coverage.
It’s clear that the promises made by President Obama and congressional Democrats about their health plan were empty ones, especially with respect to costs and savings. Costs have soared and savings are not to be found. Obamacare is estimated to cost $245 billion by 2021, and may increase the deficit by at least $500 billion in its first 10 years – and more than $1.5 trillion in its second decade.
And, if that weren’t bad enough, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin estimates that the Obamacare’s price tag could increase by close to $1 trillion over the first decade.
So much for the Administration saying that Obamacare wouldn’t increase the deficit by a single cent.
While repealing Obamacare is clearly in the best interest of our economy, jobs, doctors, patients, and taxpayers, there’s no denying that true healthcare reform is badly needed.
The key to meaningful reform, however, is not more government intervention, but market reforms that can control costs and improve quality through choice and competition. Enabling the purchase of health insurance across state lines, enacting medical liability reform, and expanding Health Savings Accounts, for instance, are all smart policies that would help put our healthcare system back on the right track.
So, happy birthday Obamacare. Let’s hope, after Americans have their say this November, that it’s your last.
Jeff Flake lives in Mesa and is the U.S. Representative for Arizona’s 6th congressional district, which covers Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler, Apache Junction and Queen Creek.
asuaguila posted at 11:57 am on Thu, Mar 22, 2012.
Dear Congressman, instead of complaining as is the norm in Washington, why don't you offer a specific counter proposal as opposed to your general objectives. Specifically, how do we provide affordable healthcare for the millions of Americans who do not have insurance and use the emergency rooms of county hospitals as their only medical option? And this option is paid for by me, a taxpayer with insurance. And by the way, my insurance costs have actually gone down since President Obama took office.
G A Custer posted at 12:18 pm on Thu, Mar 22, 2012.
Funny. Jeff Flake was not even in Washington to vote on the health care bill...and he wants a senate seat now? [wink]
dustbowl11 posted at 1:11 pm on Thu, Mar 22, 2012.
If competition keeps healthcare costs down, why didn't it work previous to Obama's presidency? And if the number of physicians are declining already, shouldn't the Government offer educational incentives to reverse the trend? Come on Flake! Do something proactive for once.
Relevant Matters posted at 1:28 pm on Thu, Mar 22, 2012.
"and there’s much more to come". Indeed.
Consider:
Most of us drive our vechicles very carefully, even though we have insurance to cover accidents.
But suppose you had no insurance. (I periodically went without it when I was a young adult and earning a pittance.) Think how much more carefully you'd drive! And how much more slowly. Yes, you would. And you'd likely drive less. (And maybe walk more and become healthier for it.)
For many people, I suspect, the better their auto insurance, the more they tend to drive and to drive faster and to drive less guardedly. (For proof of that, keep imagining how we'd drive without insurance.) That means more accidents in which people are killed and injured. Although insurance is a wonderful thing — preventing, for example, countless bankruptcies — it might have the unintended consequence of causing more accidents and more deaths and injuries than if no one had insurance.
Now consider:
In a report on how to fight pandemics, the March 2012 Discover magazine says the secret to fighting them is “knowing their real cause: disease factories built by people. Ironically, hospitals turn out to be highly efficient disease factories. They allow the proliferation and spread of dangerous germs among patients, and the evolution of those germs to extreme levels of virulence.”
In that vein, the Journal of the American Medical Association stated 12 years ago:
“America's healthcare system is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., causing between 230,000 and 284,000 fatalities per year, behind only heart disease and cancer.”
The report didn't say the third leading cause of death is poor health. It said the healthcare system itself. In other words, the third leading cause of death is the army of good-intentioned doctors, nurses, and others whose duty it is to help us avoid death.
JAMA provides a breakdown of the deaths caused by healthcare:
• 12,000 deaths per year due to unnecessary surgery
• 7,000 deaths per year due to medication errors in hospitals
• 20,000 deaths per year due to other errors in hospitals
• 80,000 deaths per year due to infections in hospitals
• 106,000 deaths per year due to negative effects of drugs
You may already hear me asking, “Why don't we drop our health insurance and stay away from doctors?”
If no one had health insurance, lots of things could happen, good and bad. Here's a quirky thing I believe is possible:
In 2008, shortly after the economic collapse, I was watching a CNN reporter interview a woman on the street. She had just lost her job. The reporter asked how she was coping.
“Along with my job, I lost my health insurance,” she said [I paraphrase]. “Now I have to really be careful to watch what I eat, lose weight, exercise, and take better care of myself.” I got the impression that while she had health insurance, she tended to be a bit reckless with her health, figuring she was covered if she got sick. Some people, maybe many, are like that.
Without health insurance, she became like the driver with no car insurance.
Enter President Obama's Affordable Healthcare Act (AHA), whose aim is to get everyone insured and require everyone to pay a premium.
A lot of young adults currently elect to have no health insurance (as I did years ago) because of its cost, or because they want to save money while they're young and healthy. Once they are forced to buy insurance under AHA, many can be counted on to frequently see a doctor for minor things simply “to get my money's worth.”
How many more people, because they have insurance, will pay less attention to diet and exercise like CNN's woman on the street, and develop medical problems (such as diabetes) that require visits to the doctor that they would not have had to make while uninsured and cautious?
AHA will bring millions of more people into the healthcare system and countless others into it more often. It's supposed to, because Mr. Obama wants to spread the health around. The upshot is that millions more will interact with the healthcare providers who are, according to JAMA, our nation's third leading cause of death.
The doctors and nurses, unless there is a huge increase in their already insufficient number, will be stressed by the increased demand for services. Their rate of errors is likely to rise.
Might our healthcare system then become the second leading cause of death? Or maybe even the first?
Just what are we doing?
Dale Whiting posted at 5:58 pm on Thu, Mar 22, 2012.
Actually Jake,
I'm hoping to celebrate with the Affordable Healthcare Act a great many other birthdays. It has need for improvements. If the federal mandate is found to be unconstitutional, then I'm in favor of a public option. I have the public option of VA healthcare now. And I turned down Medicare, a less than public option.
Most of the rest of the improvements needed will help develop more economical delivery of healthcare services. The systems in place now have been proven less than optimal in several "experiments" across the nation.
So, Flaky Jake, go flake off elsewhere. Your dandriff is showing!
k33j88 posted at 4:54 am on Fri, Mar 23, 2012.
Thank You Congressman Flake for supporting the Tea Party movement and all that is good and decent concerning their issues. RIGHT ON in your assesment of obamacare and its disastrous effects. Dissent protects democracy, but in this case, the socialists want nothing less but the re-writing of our beloved Constitution. The left has been co-opted bt the Marxist/sharia-mandated/alinsky radicals, hell-bent on destroying all that our forefathers worked for. Thank you for carrying the torch of freedom from tyranny.
Dale Whiting posted at 7:47 am on Fri, Mar 23, 2012.
KJ,
"Disasterous effects?" Have you ever been denied or know someone who has been denied life saving healthcare services due to a claim of pre-existing conditions? Remember a good 20% of revenues received by healthcare insurance companies before the act passed into law was taken up in denying such claims. Is going back to this way of doing business what you mean by carrying the torch of freedom from tyranny? I don't find having that 20% applied to treatment of pre-existing conditions as either tyranny or an assault on the constitution. But it would appear that you do!
And do you have any children between the ages of 21 and 26 who can't get healhcare in the work place? A lot of women in those important child bearing years need healthcare so that their babies can be born without bankrupting the family. Are you against pre-natial healthcare? When my second child was born, I had just changed jobs. My wife's pregnancy was viewed as a pre-existing condition. I had to ask my parents to loan me $1,300 to pay for the OBGYN. That was his cut rate. As our prior doctor, he felt obligated to do his part! My new employer's coverage did include the pediatrician.
No kj, you need to rethink your position on the Affordable Healthcare Act. It's the right thing to do!
Rich posted at 12:29 pm on Fri, Mar 23, 2012.
No Dale, it's not. It can only lower quality and enhance cost. And that's the upside. As RM pointed out, our current system is the third leading cause of death, sitting a bureaucracy on top of it is an attempt to elevate it to number one.
VofReason posted at 2:01 pm on Fri, Mar 23, 2012.
Why is it that "conservative" Dale never actually agrees with "real" conservatives? Hmmmm. Does anyone above belive that Obamacare is actually going to save cost to anyone except those who don't pay for insurance as is? Or does that matter?
bobunf posted at 12:51 am on Sun, Mar 25, 2012.
Before Obamacare the US developed the most expensive health care system in the world with the worst health care outcomes of any developed country.
The US spends 2-1/2 times the average cost per capita of those countries with better health outcomes.
Larger countries with higher life expectancies at birth than the US:
1980 16
1992 19
2000 22
2009 29
Australians, Canadians and Frenchmen live three years longer than the average American.
Larger countries with lower infant mortality rates than the US:
1960 12
1970 14
1980 17
1986 19
1990 23
2000 27
2009 29
15,000 American babies die each year, who would be alive if they'd been born in Sweden, Japan or Iceland.
Excess US mortality ages 1 to 6 for males and females:
1 to 2 27% 18%
2 to 3 32% 30%
3 to 4 28% 23%
4 to 5 31% 23%
5 to 6 32% 32%
At age 24 American men die 505% more often than British men; American women
44% faster.
The US health care system before Obamacare was incredibly expensive and produced absolutely terrible results.
Congressman Flake has been in Congress for almost 12 years; during six years of that time Congressman Flake's party controlled both Houses of Congress and the Presidency. What did he and his party do during that time, and in the subsequent 5+ years about this abysmal situation?
The answer is pretty clear: Nothing.
As King Lear put it, "Nothing will come of nothing."
We do have to grant the exception that Republican Mitt Romney did, in 2006, install Romneycare in Massachusetts. Romneycare now enjoying a 62% approval rating in Massachusetts according to this poll: http://www.wbur.org/2012/02/15/health-care-wbur-poll
Obamacare was in large part patterned after Romneycare.
Dale Whiting posted at 5:17 am on Mon, Mar 26, 2012.
VofReason, You ask why I disagree with 'real' conservatives.
Well, it's really quite simple. Because you 'real' conservatives are really faux conservatives, or Neo-conservatives. And Newt Gingrich, the flag bearer for Neo-conservatism is a joke!
Voice, you may be too much of a late comer to this site. When I started commenting about 18 months ago, I had a piece published explaining what true conservatism, Bill Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater and Kirt Russell conservatism, really is. And it's based not in issues which money can and routinely does buy, but on principles money can't buy.
Conservatism is not issue based, it's principles based. And where principles are applied to issues, and where each conservative may place his or her own unique and different set weights on those principles, they may come out on different sides of any given issue.
Today's arguments over big government and constitutional principles is a fine example. On the one hand we have Neo-conservatives arguing for smaller, less envasive government meddling in business while on the other hand arguing that government needs to meddle in the private lives of women, interfearing in the private, even confidential right of privacy between women and their doctors.
On the one hand, I am opposed to abortion, favoring adoption when marriage is out of the picture. Yet the principle of limited government and right of privacy trumps this notion. And I see those "right to lifers" championing having religious based values envade government having government then envade privacy.
So which is it Neo-cons? Big government envading the private lives of women? Or big government envading the private lives of businessmen? Neither makes sense from a principle based analysis.
Is this too complicated for the Neo-conservative mind to grasp? Or has your mind been taken over? Are you another 'ditto head?' Remember, before you voice your reasoning, first reason with your mind!
Dale Whiting posted at 5:19 am on Mon, Mar 26, 2012.
bobunf,
There you go again, confusing us all with facts!
Arizona Willie posted at 8:39 am on Mon, Mar 26, 2012.
The Republicans are taking the Health Care law which they mislabel " Obamacare " to the Supreme Court claiming the government can't force people to buy insurance.
Hmmm, I wonder why they didn't do that when Romneycare passed?
Oh .... yeah .... the new Health Care Law which they mislabel " Obamacare " and which was passed by Congress which is full of Republicans ... is associated with that Ebony mo-fo.
VofReason posted at 1:26 pm on Mon, Mar 26, 2012.
Thank you for the tutorial Dale. Why is it that people outside of Dale consider the Goldwater Institute (ie Tom Patterson) and Rep Flake "conservative, but Dale considers them faux conservative. Hmmm. Maybe it's just Dale that thinks he is conservative and the rest who actuall tout conservatism are not.
Slabside posted at 3:37 pm on Mon, Mar 26, 2012.
DING DING DING! And we have a winner! Today's "Liberal Racist Jacka_s_s Award" goes to Arizona Willie for interjecting racism when he has no valid argument.
Masterrogue666 posted at 9:30 pm on Mon, Mar 26, 2012.
Wow. AZ Willie actually thinks it has to do with race?
Now I HAVE seen everything.....
bobunf posted at 12:42 am on Tue, Mar 27, 2012.
Thanks, in part, to Jeff Flake, who did nothing about it for a dozen years, Americans have the most expensive health care system in the world with the worst health care outcomes of any developed country.
Now he's whining about an attempt to control costs and improve outcomes, so we don't spend an extra Trillion dollars a year on health care while living three years less than Canadians, with our babies dying at twice the rate of the French.