Thursday, October 24, 2013

Obamacare Imploding Sooner Than Expected

I have been suggesting that Obamacare needed to go full steam ahead for one simple reason.
Because it would implode under the whole scheme of funding and its own unsustainability.
I figured that it would take longer, but I am beginning to think that the implosion has occurred sooner than I expected.
That implosion actually began on October 1, 2013 when the health insurance "marketplace" officially went online.
While I sympathized with Sens. Cruz and Lee wanting to simply defund O-Care, they did not get all on board long before the October deadline in which all Americans could go to www.healthcare.gov and easily plug in some information, compare many different plans and why sign-up with little if any problem. I got their righteous fear that health care in America would be destroyed forever. But sometimes, even when one is right, we have to simply burn it down. Let the law come into being to see just how bad it is.
Once again, I refer you the former House Speaker, Congressman Nancy Pelosi (Dim Wit-Cal) said about the need to pass the so-called Affordable Health Care Act:

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”

I will not torture you once again with video I used in another post. I think that goes against the Geneva convention or something like that.
Yes, the bill passed with not one single Republican vote in either chamber. And what we found out is this.
That they can not even begin and or run a functioning website, what is a huge feature of signing up people to purchase health insurance. We are reduced to seeing our president, the Dear Leader, President Obama, acting worse than a used car salesman all but begging people to get health insurance by phone or that old-fashioned, antiquated way. . .using paper applications!
It's not just an inoperable website. It is that once one goes beyond the home page to provide information, they have no privacy. Now I'm sorry, when I am providing a government website with my personal information, my personal health information, hell fricking yes they better go all out to insure that I have privacy. Which is why I go no further than the home page.
No I totally admit, I am not a computer genius. I can barely get the basics. But I know this much. If you are providing a website such as the "marketplace", I think that the people who operate www.amazon.com would be awesome to bring on to set up the website. Or what about the people at Progressive car insurance? One of their claims is that you can compare policy rates between them and other car insurance companies. Why how do they do that?!
So why should any American that is signing up, some to avoid paying any fines not having health insurance and some because they have not had health insurance for whatever reason, trust that they will even get the insurance that they have signed up for?
Again, while the website is the most pressing issue now, the real issue is the unrealistic basis on how this whole scheme works.
The goal is to sign up 7,000,000 Americans at least by the time that the deadline comes into being. Out of that will be about 2,500,000 healthy, young Americans. The target demographic is 18-34 year olds. A problem is that as part of the original legislation, anyone 18-26 years old can stay on their parents health insurance. Again, I ask the question that if their parents have health insurance and they ask their kids if they want to stay on or get their own, how many are going to turn it down? You are taking a huge chunk of people out of the pool for very few will opt in. After all, why should they? The reality is that the overwhelming majority of those that will sign up, if they can, will be people that have preexisting conditions or the elderly that could not afford the insurance in the first place.
And that my friends will lead to the Death Spiral.
To put it simply, much of the cost of O-Care to implement will be put on the backs of the young and healthy. Many who will not participate unless they absolutely have to. The following is from the Forbes article I linked:

The actuaries make educated estimates and decide on a premium. But they won’t have “experience”—actual utilization rates—for a year or 18 months. If they get a disproportionate number of sick people in the pool, which ObamaCare is designed to do, premiums will rise. That increase usually drives the healthiest people out of the pool, looking for lower rates to match their healthier condition. The pool gets smaller and sicker, forcing up the rates again, driving out the next wave of people, and so on, until the insurance pool is very small, very sick and very expensive.
That’s the death spiral.

And that is pretty much why O-Care will totally implode. The writer, Merrill Matthews, sums it up very nicely:

Summing up, getting the young and healthy to sign up for ObamaCare will only be the first challenge. Getting them to stay, once they find out just how unaffordable the Affordable Care Act is, will be an even bigger hurdle.

But won't many of the young and healthy be subsidized by the federal government in the first place?
Yes, that is correct.
But again, one of the monumental problems with the infamous website is determining the information that will  determine the subsidy. There have been reports of how a lot of that information is wrong and thus an accurate subsidy may not materialize.
Let me write it bluntly if I may.
The whole scam was based on rainbows and unicorns.
At least rainbows are real.
With an unworkable website, a plan that bases costs unrealistically on young, healthy people, and just the rank incompetence of those behind O-Care, it is on the road of implosion sooner than expected.






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