Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Obamacare: Making healthcare unaffordable

Okay, so what is the state of Obamacare? I can tell you from a personal standpoint that it doesn't look good if you are typical U.S. citizen with a family. Our premiums have doubled, and the deductibles we now have to pay are so high we can't even use insurance. It's a pretty sad state.

The cost of my albuterol inhaler increased from $10 for three inhalers ten years ago to $90 for three inhalers today.  It's to the point that I don't even use my inhalers unless I leave the house. When I'm home, and when I'm working, I use nebulizer solution. Obamacare is part of the problem here, but another problem is the Montreal protocol, where politicians decided the ozone was more important than asthmatics breathing better. But that's a discussion for another day.

This is not a criticism of the place I work for at all.  Businesses have to do what they need to do to stay in business.  The reason that the cost of healthcare has gone up so much is because of the people who decided it was "a big deal" to pass the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. It's either raise premiums and deductibles, cut benefits, or close up shop.

It was not supposed to raise our prices. We were told our premiums wouldn't go up. But they have. In Santa Cruz, it is reported that insurance premiums have increased 85%. "Elkhart Teachers Face Double-Digit Hike in Health Insurance Premiums."

The alternative is to have benefits slashed, which is occurring. For instance, the Teamsters Union, which has supported democratic candidates for years, has had no choice but to slash recipient's benefits.  And you have teachers who are seeing their healthcare premiums skyrocket as well.

This was not supposed to happen.  Not to mention that 9% of Americans are still uninsured.  The whole point of Obamacare was to make sure everyone had insurance.  Most people are opting to pay the penalty because Obamacare is too expensive for them, or because they have decided that they are healthy and the risk is worth it.  Besides, the risk is worth it, because, if they need insurance, they can't get turned down anyway, so why pay health insurance when you have little mouths to feed.  Kids get welfare, so they're taken care of.

Yeah, my point is, this whole thing is a disaster.  Liberals see things that aren't ideal, they try to fix them to make them better, and everything gets worse.  That's what has happened to education in the U.S. and now it's happening to healthcare.

My liberal friends will still argue with me and tell me that it's all working great.  But the evidence is never on their side. So when I pose these and other facts, they say that I'm a dogmatic right wing radical who only reads things I agree with. That's Saul Alinsky rule #7, by the way.

This goes back to the point Rush Limbaugh made in 2008: I hope he fails.  Look, his healthcare agenda has passed, and now healthcare is worse.

But, if you look at it another way, Obamacare is succeeding in wrecking our healthcare system to the point, that perhaps some day soon, people are going to beg Uncle Sam for universal healthcare to save the day. The law is making healthcare unaffordable.

That, so they say, was the whole point of Obamacare in the first place: it was never meant to succeed the way we think. Everything that is currently occurring, the rising cost of premiums, the rising cost of deductibles, is all in the cards. When we can't afford healthcare we'll come crawling to Uncle Sam begging for universal healthcare.

A perfect example is what's going on in Colorado.  The Obamacare exchange there is close to going bankrupt, and so the state legislature there has proposed scrapping it for a statewide single payer system. The cost, they say, would be $25 million (although we know it would be much higher than that).

This is all in the name of "free healthcare."  Like when Obamacare was passed, everyone thought it would mean free healthcare. So these legislators in Colorado think a single payer would give free healthcare to everyone. The only problem is that the people who are working, which amounts to fewer citizens every day, have to flip the bill.

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