Seeing
Obamacare for the first time, it isn’t what we asked for
By Mary Claire Kendall
Wednesday,
December 25, 2013
Originally
published in The Washington Times
President Obama's famous unkept promise, "If you like your
insurance, you can keep it," has had a Scrooge-like effect on countless
Americans this Christmas season.
Far from delighting in Obamacare goodies, as Health and Human
Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius delusionally recommends, millions will be
staring at the proverbial lump of coal, having lost health insurance coverage
because of Obamacare, forced to fend for themselves on the public exchanges,
and facing a very insecure future given steep prices, risk of identity theft,
and uncertainty over actual coverage.
Individual stories shine a brighter spotlight on the misery afoot
in the land.
Take 7-year-old Hunter Alford from Gainesville, Texas. This
salt-of-the-earth child, passionate about country music, playing guitar and
keyboards, and soon the fiddle, is now fighting a rare form of cancer without
health insurance. His Children's Health Insurance Program coverage was canceled
on Nov. 1, after 18 glitch-free months. When Texas transferred the program to
Obamacare Medicaid, it seems Hunter's police officer father earned $173 a month
too much to qualify.
Can our leaders finally admit it? Obamacare is an unmitigated
disaster, and it's time to repeal and replace it with health care reform that
works for all Americans.
We've seen this movie before.
Twenty-five years ago, Americans rejected a massive government
health care overreach called the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act. Seniors
pounced — literally, on the car of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan
Rostenkowski, Illinois Democrat — and it was promptly repealed.
While Democrats like to argue Obamacare is the 2010s version of
1930s Social Security, and its 1960s Medicare and Medicaid expansions, Medicare
Catastrophic is the more apt comparison.
Like catastrophic Obamacare, Medicare Catastrophic was inspired by
social engineering do-gooders who believed government knows best. A
Congressional Budget Office staff working paper described its benefits:
"The net result of the act if it were fully effective in 1988 would be to reduce
out-of-pocket costs (direct costs plus premiums) for poor and near-poor
enrollees, while increasing costs for other groups." The ceiling on those
increased costs in 1989 was $1,600 per couple, $800 per individual. The
legislation also assumed the almost 75 percent of seniors who had Medigap
coverage would drop it in favor of Medicare.
It's the same template Obamacare uses: the well-off subsidizing
the less-well-off while assuming the former will agree to this beneficence and
sign up despite increased costs. It's the same incorrect assumption underlying
the anticipated "death spiral" that would make the "Affordable
Care Act" increasingly unaffordable, not only for families and individuals
struggling with Obamacare sticker shock, but for the nation as a whole.
Just as Medicare Catastrophic was gone when reality set in, so
should Obamacare be.
When it's repealed, we can finally put to rest that other big lie:
Republicans have no alternative proposal to Obamacare. The Patients' Choice
Act, offered in 2009 by Republican Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Devin Nunes
of California, and Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Richard Burr of North
Carolina, was a particularly good plan. Rejecting top-down, one-size-fits-all
government mandates, it emphasized disease prevention and health promotion,
affordability, accessibility, transparency and equal tax treatment. Unique
among the plans, it transformed Medicaid's inferior health care system such
that, as Mr. Nunes said, it would have given the poor not only health care, but
"dignity," because it put funds directly into their pockets to
purchase first-rate coverage.
In the Christmas classic film "It's a Wonderful Life,"
Jimmy Stewart plays the part of George Bailey, who learns how different his
hometown of Bedford Falls would be if he had never been born. Similarly, now
that we've experienced life without "the private option," we know how
dismal life can be with "the public option." Isn't it time that
Americans be given the freedom to enjoy true choice in health care?
For Hunter, and others like him, it can't happen a minute too
soon.
Miracle of miracles: Late in the day on Dec. 19, the Obama
administration decided folks who have had their insurance canceled because of
Obamacare can buy less-expensive catastrophic-only plans or be freed of the
health insurance mandate entirely, the deadline for which was Dec. 23.
President Obama minimized this eye-popping change at his news
conference Dec. 20, before he jetted off to Hawaii for his year-end vacation.
It's understandable: This unconstitutional change in the law by
presidential fiat is an admission that Obamacare is not working. Mr. Obama is
not one to admit failure — much preferring to point out the supposed failure of
others, particularly Republicans.
Giving Americans a smaller lump of coal was not exactly a
Christmas present.
Mary Claire Kendall, a Washington-based writer, served in the
Department of Health and Human Services under President George H.W. Bush.
