Just like this poor couple trying to buy a bed, we are finding out that Obamacare is a gigantic debacle, but “otherwise perfectly all right.” It’s health care, done by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Look at the facts:
- Only 51,000 people are thought to have signed up during the first week of the roll-out; the Obama Administration needs 7 million to keep the program afloat.
- So far, $30 billion has been spent on a medical records system that is non-operational.
- Obama projected the costs of his health care program at “around $900 billion over 10 years.” Instead, the Congressional Budget Office projects the cost at $1.8 trillion. Another group puts the cost at $2.6 trillion.
- “The Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588, 500 words of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,517 words in the Obamacare law itself. That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law.”
- According to Avik Roy at Forbes, under Obamacare, the cheapest plan for men will be 99 percent more expensive than under the old law. For women in any given state, it will be 62 percent more expensive.
- The Department of Health and Human Services has spent $1.5 million for a television studio to promote Obamacare.
- CGI Federal, one of the computer companies involved in creating the health care websites, “received a no-bid sweetheart contract worth $93 million. Since 2009, CGI has scored $678 million in taxpayer money for 185 separate task orders.
- Speaking of the website, why does it keep crashing? IT experts are saying it was specifically designed to create a bottleneck and run slowly. Who would design something like that? HHS employees who were afraid that a faster website would allow consumers to see the real cost of the Obamacare plans and be scared away.
- Hospitals are cutting staff and insurance carriers are leaving the market. The cost of Obamacare is cited as the reason.
This “otherwise perfectly all right” system cries out for explanation. Why has a health care system that was supposed to make health care easier and more economical gone so terribly, terribly wrong? Avik Roy has one explanation, and you’re not going to like it:
The answer is that Obamacare wasn’t designed to help healthy people with average incomes get health insurance. It was designed to force those people to pay more for coverage, in order to subsidize insurance for people with incomes near the poverty line, and those with chronic or costly medical conditions.
Otherwise, Obamacare is perfectly all right.
