By BETSY MCCAUGHEY, The New York Post
The central parts of ObamaCare don’t roll out until 2014, but the wheels are already falling off this clunker. The latest news from four federal agencies is that 1) insurance will be a lot less affordable than Americans were led to expect, 2) fewer people than promised will get insurance and 3) millions of people who have coverage through a job now will lose it, thanks to the president’s “reforms.” Oh, and children are the biggest victims. But, but, but...he said that would never happen and that only the house republicans want to starve and stop children benefits
The Affordable Care Act is looking less and less affordable.
Start with the IRS’s new estimate for what the cheapest family plan will cost by 2016: $20,000 a year to cover two adults and three kids. And that will only cover 60 percent of medical bills, so add hefty out-of-pocket costs, too. Great! so tell me just how this great Obama Care thing is helping us???
The next surprise is for parents who thought their kids would be covered by an employer. Sloppy wording in the law left that unclear until last week, when the IRS ruled that kids won’t be covered. How can that be? Over 2,600 pages and they couldn't make this clear enough? Wonder what all those pages were about???
Starting in 2014, the law will require employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer coverage or pay a penalty. “Affordable” coverage, that is — meaning the employee can’t be told to contribute more than 9.5 percent of his salary. For example, a worker earning $40,000 a year cannot be required to pay more than $3.800.
But the law doesn’t specifically mandate family coverage — and now the administration says that won’t be required. WHAT??? what did this Obama care thing do except raise the cost of our health care and screw up 1/6 of our total economy???
You can see why: If the lowest-cost family plan (again, two adults and three kids) is to run a whopping $20,000, and if the employee’s contribution is limited to $3,800, the employer’s tab would be $16,200 — adding about $7.40 an hour to the cost of that employee. Wow, I guess that small business owners will love this increase in expense huh! Wisely, the IRS announced on Jan. 30 that employers won’t have to pay for dependents.
But the Congressional Budget Office’s much-cited prediction that ObamaCare would leave only 30 million people uninsured by 2016 was based on the assumption that kids would be covered by employers. At the very least, employers insuring their workers for the first time to avoid the penalty are unlikely to do that.
So how will the kids be covered? They won’t. The IRS shocked the law’s advocates by announcing that the insurance exchanges won’t provide subsidies for a child whose parent is covered at work.
Nor will these parents be penalized for not insuring their children — the IRS will kindly consider the kids exempt from the mandate. What? again, how many pages and just what in the world did all those pages cover???
Also exempt are millions of people who’ll stay uninsured because their state is wisely choosing not to loosen Medicaid eligibility.
Some background: Despite President Obama’s promises to help solve the problem of the uninsured by making private health plans more affordable, the law expands coverage mainly by forcing states to loosen their Medicaid eligibility rules. But the Supreme Court ruled that the feds can’t command states in this way.
At first, the CBO said that ruling would only prevent 4 million people from gaining coverage — but more states than it expected are refusing to go along; it could well be 8 million more without coverage.
Oh, and the CBO last week also doubled its previous estimate on how many people will lose the health coverage they now get through work, upping the figure to 8 million by 2016 and 12 million by 2019. Several top consulting firms put the figures even higher. So tell me just why we have to suffer this ObamaCare mess? Why must we destroy the best healthcare system in the world just because Obama wants to put his name in history? I'm pretty sure it will already be there and in 40-50 years, historians will spell it OneBigAssMisstakeAmerica
