Friday, January 24, 2014

Drilling More Holes in Obamacare’s Sinking Ship!

 Townhall.com ^ | January 24, 2014 | Daniel J. Mitchell

The President’s main “accomplishment” has been such a disaster that I wonder whether it’s time to feel sorry for Obama.
And if you looked in the dictionary for a definition of Schadenfreude, you might find a picture of me reading a story exposing more evidence that Obamacare isn’t working.
Heck, I’ve even shared Hitler parody videos (two of them!) mocking the law.
But to paraphrase Mae West, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.
Today, we’re going to look at the opinions of two experts, both of whom expect further bad news for Obamacare.
Here’s some of what Michael Tanner, my Cato colleague, wrote for the New York Post.
…“the State of ObamaCare” is growing ever more troubled. For starters, it’s falling far short of the goal of universal coverage. …just 1.5 million have actually completed the ObamaCare checkout, including payment. Worse, surveys indicate that less than a third of those enrolling were previously uninsured. …Even using the most optimistic reading of these figures, fewer than 11 percent of uninsured Americans have gotten coverage because of the ObamaCare law; most likely, fewer. This is what we’re getting for the $2.7 trillion that ObamaCare will cost over the next 10 years? Plus, we should subtract the roughly 500,000 Americans who, by the White House’s own count, have lost insurance because of ObamaCare.
And Mike expects things will get worse over time.
…that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because those policy-killing rules will hit another part of the market over the course of this year — namely, the “small group” market, where employers now buy health policies that cover about 78 million Americans. Many of those with cancelled plans will ultimately end up with similar, if more expensive, employment-based policies, but some are likely to simply wind up uninsured. …Then there’s the bad news about who is enrolling in ObamaCare plans — or rather, who isn’t: not enough of the young and healthy folks that the program needs to overpay for insurance so as to offset the costs of covering older and sicker people. …Oh, and a Reuters survey finds that new enrollees are also less healthy than ObamaCare’s designers hoped, too. Humana, one of the nation’s largest insurers, reports that so far enrollment in its exchange-based plans has been far “more adverse than previously expected.”

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