Obamacare: Facts, figures, and hand-wringing
I am responding to the My Turn article from Feb. 4.
In her My Turn article, Sandra Boynton tells us about her experience as an insurance consumer and a former registered nurse.
She has lots of facts and figures to support her argument. She has obviously done her homework. But facts and figures are funny things. One can always find the ones that support your argument.
I’m more of a “what is happening in front of my face” kind of guy. What am I seeing in my own world?
It seems that, from her point of view, her premiums are reasonable, her coverage is reasonable and the increase in her premiums are reasonable. She has had the same medical insurance for 54 years. Apparently, she had no medical insurance problems before Obamacare and doesn’t have any now. So from her point of view, Obamacare is working.
It looks like she’s the person Obama was referring to when he said you can keep your old plan and your old doctor. Because he certainly wasn’t talking about the rest of us.
So, now you have heard her story, let me tell you mine…
I am a local insurance agent and I have sold medical insurance for more than 20 years. I pay $613 per month for an Obamacare plan that carries with it a $6,000 deductible. This is essentially a major-medical plan that will only come into play in the worst of circumstances.
It is worthless for any kind of health maintenance, but it costs me $613 a month. In 2015 I was paying $494 and my deductible was $4,000. That’s an increase in cost of 25 percent and an increase in my deductible of 50 percent.
Obamacare isn’t working for me.
I have low-income customers that pay next to nothing for their Obamacare plans and they also have extremely low deductibles, some as low as $100. So, they have true, quality, usable healthcare coverage, but do not pay for it.
Obamacare works for them.
I have other low income customers, who make even less than the low-income customers referenced above, that get absolutely no benefits. No subsidies, no reduced deductibles, no Medicaid, nothing. But, if they file their taxes, they do get a fat fine for not buying health insurance they cannot afford. Maybe they get a waiver on the fine, maybe they don’t.
Obamacare isn’t working for them.
If I have an employer that wants to offer health insurance as a group benefit, he/she is discouraged because if they do, then any employee receiving Obamacare benefits will lose them.
Obamacare isn’t working for them.
So, yes, some people have benefitted from Obamacare. Yes, you can always trot out facts, figures and anecdotes to support your particular views. But from my point of view, for every person that benefits from Obamacare, at least two get screwed.
So, Sandra Boynton’s experience and opinion notwithstanding, from my point of view, Obamacare does not work. Furthermore, I don’t think it was ever expected to work. I think the people that put Obamacare into place really wanted a single-payer health plan, but knew they couldn’t sell that to the American public.
So, they opted for an unworkable plan that, after it collapsed (as planned) they would be able to say “hey, we tried” and then move on to their real goal, the single-payer plan. Unfortunately, they ran out of political operatives before they could pull that particular trigger. They had expected Hillary to follow through after she was elected (as planned).
So now, the Republican-led government is saddled with a health care plan that was never expected to work and they must sort it all out. Obamacare was a mess from the start, it was a mess until now and it is going to get messier as we move along. But it doesn’t work, wasn’t intended to work, will never work and needs to be fixed.
And all the facts, figures, anecdotes and hand wringing won’t change that.
So, let’s get on with it shall we?
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Walter Litman is a resident of Coeur d'Alene