April Fools Day
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP, MACE
On Tuesday April 1,2014 President Obama did a victory lap for Obamacare. April 1st is April Fools Day.
He stopped calling it the Affordable Care Act and once again called it “Obamacare”.
He announced that 7.1 million American have signed up for Obamacare on the Health Insurance Exchange web site healthcare.gov.
Since October the Obama administration has avoided providing the number of enrollees in Obamacare and its demographic makeup. The administration claimed they did not have the exact numbers.
The public viewed this as the administration’s avoidance of the number of enrollees who have purchased insurance because the numbers were so pitiful.
On April Fools Day one day after enrollment ended, President Obama announced the exact number that has signed up to the exact decimal point. It was 7.1 million.
Is that not strange?
I am publishing President Obama’s entire press conference. It is a must watch.
His words and body language is a site to behold. The audience's body language in also very telling.
President Obama is extremely charming. The speech is littered with half-truths, misinformation and lies.
He calls all his critics liars just as Harry Reid did. The president doesn’t point out where they have lied just as Harry Reid did not.
This is a Saul Alinsky tactic.
He is so charming in his delivery that the audience wants to believe him despite the dysinformation.
He even threated the media. He warned them not to headline news of these glitches and problems just because there are some glitches and bad events ahead with Obamacare.
The most transparent half-truth was when he said “we haven’t seen any death panels yet as our opponents predicted.”
He right correct. He postponed initiating his “death panels”, the Independent Physicians Advisory Board (IPAB) himself until after the November 2014 elections.
His message is the Republicans are liars. The Democrats in vulnerable states can run on Obamacare because Obamacare is great for the people. He gave three examples to prove his point. Beware of the man with three cases.
He did not discuss the Congressional Budget Office’s view of Obamacare’s effect on the economy.
The Obama administration called the CBO report a lie. It measured the wrong things.
The main cause of this trend is the work-discouraging combination of taxes and subsidies for lower-income Americans in Obamacare. In other words, the implied tax and subsidy penalties for success are so high that it won’t be worth a lower-income person’s effort to try to climb up the income ladder.
There goes the American dream. A dream that has driven America to the success it has achieved.
And while the CBO does suggest that demand for labor will not decline substantially due to the costs imposed by Obamacare, they do say that costs “will be borne primarily by workers in the form of reduced wages or other compensation.” So even the White House’s good news is bad news for working Americans.
Here is what he failed to discuss.
How many of those who signed up have actually paid the premium and purchased the healthcare insurance?
How many of those 7.1 million included the 6.6 million who lost insurance because of Obamacare?
How many were young adults signed up?
How many of the young and uninsured enrolled and paid their first premium?
How many of the older adults signing up had preexisting illness?
What is going to happen to the additional millions who are going to lose their healthcare insurance when their work hours are reduced below 30 hours per week?
How will they afford Obamacare insurance?
How will the McDonald waiver insurance workers afford insurance when the waivers expire?
What will happen to unions when the workers realize they are losing $5 dollar an hour in pay because of Obamacare?
If 7.1 billion people now have healthcare insurance what does it cover?
The are hundreds of examples of cancer patients losing their doctors, buying health insurance care insurance and discovering that their cancer therapy is not covered?
How many of the previously 48 million uninsured now have become insured?
The entire idea of Obamacare is to insure the uninsured.
The Rand Corporation has completed a secretive survey for the Obama administration. The goal was to estimate how many uninsured received healthcare insurance.
Isn’t the price America has paid so far for overturning, uprooting, and revolutionizing 18% of the economy and the medical care ecosystem staggering for only insuring 875,000 of the previously uninsured.
Someone should add up the cost in newly levied taxes, the effect on middle class income and standard of living, the cost of the massive bureaucracy, and the cost regulations as well as the cost of economic growth that Obamacare has had on the American economy.
The bizarre thing is Obamacare does not solve the issue of the dysfunction in the healthcare system. The ever increasing price of healthcare is the result of the misalignment of all the stakeholders' incentives.
The misalignment has increased with Obamacare.
A new business plan that aligns all the stakeholders incentives which is focused on consumers must be developed.
Obamacare does not bend the cost curve no matter how President Obama has lies about it.
President Obama has had no interest in the cost of Obamacare to America. His goal is complete central control over the healthcare system.
His April Fools Day press conference is no joke!
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone
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