Medicine

The left does not do economics. They do politics and elections and lying to get past the “stupid voters” but, when pressed, nothing they do qualifies as numerically or mathematically sound. Social Security worked until everyone found the queue and until Congress raided the trust fund in the 90s.

Obama and the Democrat leaders knew that Hillary made enemies of the insurance companies in 1992. The insurance companies funded devastating TV ads with “Harry and Louise” that cost the Democrats Congress in 1994. Therefore, they had to do what was necessary to get the insurance companies “inside the tent pissing out and not outside the tent pissing in” in Lyndon Johnson’s immortal words.

Insurance companies have considered health insurance a loser for 25 years now. What they prefer is becoming “Administrative Service Organizations” which administer self funded health plans by employers.

Corporate benefits include- organizing/ negotiating health insurance, group dental, STD, LTD, life, etc.

The plan the Democrats came up with, with Gruber’s help, was to make the government the funding entity and pay the insurance companies to run the program. That way everybody is happy, except, of course, the taxpayer. The taxpayer does not like tax increases which would be needed to pay the bills. Therefore the taxpayer has to be fooled.

The excise tax on high-cost health plans was among the many fees and taxes proposed as offsets to help slow the rate of growth of health costs, particularly premium growth, and finance the nationwide expansion of health coverage. When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010, its coverage provisions were estimated to cost more than $900 billion over the next decade, from 2010 to 2019, and were to be paid for by fees and taxes on both individuals and businesses. At the time the health reform bill passed, the excise tax on high-cost plans was estimated to raise roughly $32 billion in revenue over the next decade, or by 2019.

Without the taxes to pay the bills, the whole plan collapses. At its base, Obamacare is Medicaid for everyone. The employer mandate has been, contrary to the text of the law, postponed as the flaws in implementation appear. If it were to be enforced, there would be a revolution. Basically, Obamacare will destroy the health care plans of the 85% of the population who are satisfied with what they have to enroll everyone in a new program that approximates what Medicaid does. The reason for this is that our betters in Washington have decided that we spend too much on health care. That may even be true. One way to deal with this would be to use a market-based approach that resembles how health care was paid for 60 years ago. I have previously discussed how this worked and how it might be restored.

Today, the vast majority of Americans get health insurance as a benefit from their employer. How this developed has been discussed at length and began during World War Two. In 2008, John McCain proposed a possible way to disconnect employment, alleged to create “Job Lock” but he lost the election. A hostile analysis of his proposal is here. The McCain campaign’s description is here.

What became Obamacare is the work of the Democrat staff of Congress when the Democrats had filibuster proof majorities in both houses. The election of Scott Brown in a reaction to the impending passage of the health plan forced them to rush the bill through without amendments before Brown was sworn in January 2010.

The taxes to fund Obamacare were hidden as “fines and penalties” until exposed by the Supreme Court in its 2012 decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare. All penalties are now taxes. The largest are on employer-funded plans.

The funding from employee plans is called “The Cadillac Tax which is an excise tax on employer plans that exceed the benefits of Medicaid. The “exchange plans” are increasingly looking like Medicaid, especially in the narrow networks of providers, as doctors are now called.

As health coverage expands to tens of millions of Americans–through Medicaid expansion in states and the new state health insurance exchanges that will soon begin selling individual health coverage–some Americans with employer-sponsored health coverage are seeing their benefits decrease.

One of the most significant, and controversial, provisions of the Affordable Care Act is the new excise tax on high-cost health plans proposed to both slow the rate of growth of health costs and finance the expansion of health coverage. The provision is often called the “Cadillac” tax because it targets so-called Cadillac health plans that provide workers the most generous level of health benefits. These high-end health plans’ premiums are paid for mostly by employers. They also have low, if any, deductibles and little cost sharing for employees.

If this is ever implemented, the Medicaid-for-all nature of Obamacare will become obvious. That’s why it will not happen. The fundamental premise behind Obamacare is not viable. That is why it will fail and the numbers do not add up.

Gruber can’t say this. All he can do is obfuscate.