The following articles offer different understandings to this new health care law:
Doomsday Machine Creating More Uninsured
Many years ago I saw a Star Trek episode (the original one with Leonard Nimoy and Denny Crane, I mean William Shatner). There was a giant tube aimlessly bouncing around the galaxy gobbling up and destroying everything in its path. It was called The Doomsday Machine. Apparently it was left over from some long forgotten alien war and was still mindlessly destroying everything in its path. Even planets. It was uncontrolled and uncontrollable. I don't remember how they dealt with it. But ObamaCare has taken on the aura of The Doomsday Machine. Since the Roberts Court let the law stand on the basis that the penalties are really a tax, but took away the ability of the federal government to coerce states into expanding Medicaid, ObamaCare is like that giant tube, bouncing around the US economy destroying everything in its path. It is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Or it is like the end of Dr. Strangelove when the Russian sets off the Doomsday Machine - a series of uncontrolled atomic explosions. Believe it or not, they used to speculate the Russians had such a device. My father who was a Chief Engineer at Boeing attended seminars about such a device. He said at the time, "It is a big waste of time because if they have it and use it, there will be nothing to plan for." As we later discovered, the Russians weren't as suicidal as we had been led to believe. But ObamaCare is kind of like that, too. Remember that the "Medicaid Coercion Factor" was voted down 7-2, meaning Chief Justice Roberts got two of the liberals to go along (Breyer and Kagan). The ObamaCare plan was to dump as many patients as possible into Medicaid and over time convert that into the single payer. Liberals have long had a fantasy love affair with the idea of Medicaid, which by the way, is an awful program.
Now there is a distinct possibility that ObamaCare will actually increase the number of uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is projecting there will be 30 million uninsured after the implementation of ObamaCare. What's up with that? I thought for all the effort, we would be insuring everyone. That assumes everything goes according to plan. But it could get worse. Since companies may end up paying a fine of a few thousand dollars, many are itching to dump their workers onto either Medicaid or the exchanges. But with no ability of the feds to make states pay for Medicaid, those workers will be out in the cold. As in "no insurance." Also, giant cracks are showing up in the IRS plan to collect taxes for ObamaCare. There appears to be no ability to collect the taxes written into the law. That was ill planned, too.
If a company pays $10,000 dollars to insure a worker, but can pay $2000 and dump them on Medicaid, that is what they will do. If the state doesn't have Medicaid, then the worker becomes uninsured. There is no provision that forces a state to create an insurance exchange. That is up to the feds. But the feds can't pay subsidies like the states can. Considering there was never anyway to pay for ObamaCare from the start, things have just gone downhill. The Class Act was a harebrained scheme whereby people would buy nursing home insurance in their 20s and 30s. That money was to finance ObamaCare. The Class Act got dropped last fall. No one was signing up for it. Duh! Add in all the double booking of spending, the increased expenditures called "cost cutting" and the "tax" that isn't a "tax" - it is looking worse by the minute.
Tony Francis, MD
Many years ago I saw a Star Trek episode (the original one with Leonard Nimoy and Denny Crane, I mean William Shatner). There was a giant tube aimlessly bouncing around the galaxy gobbling up and destroying everything in its path. It was called The Doomsday Machine. Apparently it was left over from some long forgotten alien war and was still mindlessly destroying everything in its path. Even planets. It was uncontrolled and uncontrollable. I don't remember how they dealt with it. But ObamaCare has taken on the aura of The Doomsday Machine. Since the Roberts Court let the law stand on the basis that the penalties are really a tax, but took away the ability of the federal government to coerce states into expanding Medicaid, ObamaCare is like that giant tube, bouncing around the US economy destroying everything in its path. It is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Or it is like the end of Dr. Strangelove when the Russian sets off the Doomsday Machine - a series of uncontrolled atomic explosions. Believe it or not, they used to speculate the Russians had such a device. My father who was a Chief Engineer at Boeing attended seminars about such a device. He said at the time, "It is a big waste of time because if they have it and use it, there will be nothing to plan for." As we later discovered, the Russians weren't as suicidal as we had been led to believe. But ObamaCare is kind of like that, too. Remember that the "Medicaid Coercion Factor" was voted down 7-2, meaning Chief Justice Roberts got two of the liberals to go along (Breyer and Kagan). The ObamaCare plan was to dump as many patients as possible into Medicaid and over time convert that into the single payer. Liberals have long had a fantasy love affair with the idea of Medicaid, which by the way, is an awful program.
Now there is a distinct possibility that ObamaCare will actually increase the number of uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is projecting there will be 30 million uninsured after the implementation of ObamaCare. What's up with that? I thought for all the effort, we would be insuring everyone. That assumes everything goes according to plan. But it could get worse. Since companies may end up paying a fine of a few thousand dollars, many are itching to dump their workers onto either Medicaid or the exchanges. But with no ability of the feds to make states pay for Medicaid, those workers will be out in the cold. As in "no insurance." Also, giant cracks are showing up in the IRS plan to collect taxes for ObamaCare. There appears to be no ability to collect the taxes written into the law. That was ill planned, too.
If a company pays $10,000 dollars to insure a worker, but can pay $2000 and dump them on Medicaid, that is what they will do. If the state doesn't have Medicaid, then the worker becomes uninsured. There is no provision that forces a state to create an insurance exchange. That is up to the feds. But the feds can't pay subsidies like the states can. Considering there was never anyway to pay for ObamaCare from the start, things have just gone downhill. The Class Act was a harebrained scheme whereby people would buy nursing home insurance in their 20s and 30s. That money was to finance ObamaCare. The Class Act got dropped last fall. No one was signing up for it. Duh! Add in all the double booking of spending, the increased expenditures called "cost cutting" and the "tax" that isn't a "tax" - it is looking worse by the minute.
Tony Francis, MD
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