One thing I keep saying about Obamacare is that the Republicans will not defeat it. Instead, Obamacare itself will defeat Obamacare. It was a complete disaster from the start and even most critics underestimated just how much of a disaster it would be.
Obamacare’s signature part is requiring that nearly everyone buy health insurance (although it really isn’t health insurance anymore) or else pay a penalty (tax). We forget about the many taxes that we got with Obamacare such as the additional income tax on high income earners. We forget about the tax against sun tanning salons. We forget that you can no longer use HSA money to buy over-the-counter drugs with pre-tax money. These are just a few of things.
One interesting thing about Obamacare is that it doesn’t provide any significant savings elsewhere. It is not as if we got Obamacare to replace Medicaid. The Medicaid program will still go on and probably expand.
If everyone is going to have health insurance, then why is Medicaid still necessary? I guess it is because some people will still not have insurance and even those that do will not be able to afford the high deductibles.
Obamacare has gotten off to an even rockier start than I could have imagined. The government, with its huge extractions of money, still cannot get a functioning website. This is really incredible. We know that the government is incompetent, but usually something like this can be made functional by outsourcing it to a private business.
In this case, the Obamacare website is truly symbolic of the bureaucracy that is government. It is also symbolic of the corruption that comes with power and money, as we find out that one of the executives of the company that received the no-bid contract to build the website is a former Princeton classmate of Michelle Obama. There always seem to be coincidences at the top levels.
Now we are getting reports of the millions of people who are being dropped from their insurance plans. Obamacare has a list of mandatory things that insurance must cover (which again, means it isn’t insurance at all). Because of this, many insurance plans that did not previously cover these mandatory things are going away. This has been another feature of Obamacare that is symbolic. Politicians lie. Obama promised that anybody who was happy with their current insurance and wanted to keep it would not be affected.
And now we are just getting to the big thing with Obamacare. That is the price. For a middle class family that receives little or nothing in the way of subsidies, the premiums will be quite high. I don’t know how some families will afford a monthly premium that will be something in the range of a car payment. The average American family is already struggling to pay the bills because of the huge government spending and massive monetary inflation we have seen. This is just one more burden. Perhaps we could say it is another straw on the camel’s back.
But wait until some of these people actually have to go to the doctor or hospital for medical care. Many of the less expensive insurance plans are for high deductible plans. A family may have to spend a few thousand dollars before the insurance actually kicks in. Do you think most American families have a few extra thousand dollars laying around?
Obamacare, at this point, is much like the housing bubble that we went through. It is simply unsustainable. Just as there was no way that millions of families could afford the huge mortgage payments during the housing bubble, there is no way that millions of American families can afford to pay the huge premiums and medical costs associated with Obamacare.
In conclusion, Obamacare is unsustainable and will not last for long. Something will change. It might be nationalized medical care. It might be a turn towards more of a free market. But Obamacare will not last.