Obamacare’s Disasters Are Unfolding
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP,MACE
Along with the web site’s disastrous failures, other impending Obamacare disasters are unfolding.
Things look so bad for Obamacare that President Obama sent out a directive to change its name from Obamacare to the Affordable Care Act.
I believe Americans are well aware of the fact that Obamacare is neither affordable nor accountable to consumers. A name change will not help. Obamacare will not bend the cost curve nor save each family $2500 a year for healthcare insurance.
I have pointed out the problems with Obamacare since before its inception.
The list includes;
Loss of your current insurance policy.
- Loss of your present doctor.
- Loss of participating doctors in your network.
- Loss of your present insurance coverage.
- Failure of the development of Accountable Care Organizations.
- Failure of Pay4Performance measures to reimburse physicians and hospitals.
- The lack of incentive for consumers to take care of their health or healthcare dollars.
- The lack of dealing with the issue of tort reform. Tort reform would lower the cost of care dramatically.
- It does not decrease healthcare insurance industry abuse of the Medical Loss Ratio.
- It has not increased the ease of data transfer among providers.
- The loss of freedom of choice for consumers and physicians.
Where is the physicians’ outrage?
Premiums and deductibles are rising. Medical care is starting to be rationed. The intensity of the outrage will rise as access to care decreases.
A physician friend of mind who is over 65 years old on Medicare said Medicare has been good to him and his wife.
Medicare has also been good to his practice of internal medicine. He believes America should have Medicare for all with a single party payer.
I just listened and smiled. The old Medicare system is unsustainable. Wait until he sees the new Medicare premiums for seniors and the reimbursement schedule for physicians in 2014.
Forget the regulations he is going to have to deal with. Forget the restrictions of access to care he will have to deal with. Forget the rationing of care he will have to deal with.
It will not be pleasant.
Consumers are realizing they are the victims of higher prices and lower levels of care. Hospitals, insurance companies and doctors are also going to be the victims of enslavement by regulations.
Government bureaucracy, inefficency and waste will flourish.
I hope everyone realizes that the individual market was the first market to be attacked by Obamacare because it is the smallest market. The individual market only affects 5 million people.
The next market in line to be destroyed is seniors and Medicare. It is starting already with the destruction of Medicare Advantage.
The employer sponsored healthcare insurance market will start being destroyed in 2014.
President Obama just delayed the implementation of the private market mandate from October 15th until after the November 2014 elections.
I believe the American people are on to President Obama’s tactics of attacking his enemies personally.
Consumer outrage about Obamacare will dominate the media despite President Obama’s attempt to manipulate the liberal traditional media.
He seems desperate to create a distraction. His Iranian deal will create a temporary distraction.
President Obama brought several selected progressive “influential commentators” to the White House for a little policy briefing last week.
They all said the meeting was confidential. I say the meeting was an attempt at media manipulation. Hopefully the media is realizing reality.
Obamacare was supposed to be built by the best minds in the healthcare policy business. It appears the problem was these best minds knew little about the healthcare insurance business, the hospital system business or the practice of medicine.
Obamacare has not aligned any of the vested interests of the primary and secondary stakeholders. In fact, misalignment of vested interests has increased since passage of the law.
I cannot figure out what the President Obama was thinking. All signs point to the fact that President Obama wants to destroy the present healthcare system and replace it with a single party payer system.
I have pointed out multiple examples in this thinking including President Obama’s declaration as far back as 2003 and since that he prefers a single party payer system.
He has also emphasized that the universal care system he will put into place (Obamacare) is a transitional system. It is a system that will collapse and be replaced with a single party payer.
This You Tube is compelling. It demonstrates President Obama’s ideological goal not practical goals.
President Obama admits that Obamacare is a transition system. He wants to eliminate employer sponsored healthcare coverage and the destruction of the healthcare insurance industry.
President Obama simply ignores the fact that the administrative services are provided by the healthcare insurance industry to administer Medicare and Medicaid.
The government could not do it without the healthcare insurance industry. The cost of the administrative services is a non-transparent 40% of every Medicare and Medicaid dollar.
Medicare and Medicaid are single party payer systems. The healthcare insurance industry presumably bids for each states contract. Indirectly the healthcare insurance company rips off the consumers by ripping off the government for the administrative service for Medicare and Medicaid.
All we have to do is remember the $2,000 toilet seats in a government cargo plane to understand the efficiency of a government run program that outsources the fulfillment of a mission.
It is hard for most people to believe that President Obama’s purpose all along was to destroy Obamacare (his namesake) and replace it with a single party payer system.
Everyone must notice that he is now been calling Obamacare the Affordable Care Act.
I am sure he wanted the hysteria that is going on right now over dropped insurance coverage, dropped physicians and changed insurance plans to subside.
However he did not expect the mistrust the public has for him. The genie is out of the bottle. The country doesn’t trust this nice guy anymore.
He did not expect the outrage to be directed at him. This is the reason he is blaming the failure on the Republican Party one day, the healthcare insurance companies the next and doctors and hospital systems the next.
He has also giving special favors to his political base. These favors has made the middle class public very angry at him.
A more glaring favor is exempting all of congress from participating in Obamacare.
The fast food companies’ exemption has angered small business owners.
Exempting unions from Obamacare has been totally disgraceful.
The destruction of Medicare Advantage for seniors is on the way. Senior outrage will be seen in the next few months.
President Obama is going to try to blame the healthcare insurance industry, hospital systems and physicians for this disaster.
Very few Americans are going to believe him.
Americans understand that he is forcing premium prices and out of pocket expenses up with unnecessary bureaucracy and regulations.
He is restricting care to the elderly and access to care in hospitals and doctors’ offices.
He has created greater dysfunction in the healthcare system.
The dysfunction is going to get worse.
He will achieve his goal to force the healthcare system to collapse.
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone
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