Victor Davis Hanson
There are all sorts of time bombs embedded within Obamacare.
Will we force doctors to treat the millions of new Medicaid patients who are signing up for services that can be only partially reimbursed? How exactly will the IRS collect penalties from millions of off-the-books youth who choose not to buy coverage?
Of the newly insured who chose not to buy health insurance in the past, how many will follow through on their initial signups with steady monthly premium payments? If many don’t, how will we collect what they owe? Will all those who lost their coverage have enough money to buy the costlier Obamacare replacement plan?
Among these unanswered questions, the most disturbing pertain to the demand that millions of so-called Millennials must purchase health insurance — estimated at about $1,700 a year — that they will hardly use. Their premiums supposedly will subsidize older, in-need Americans who cannot pay the full costs of coverage that they will draw on frequently.
We forget that young people are already targeted for a number of government redistribution plans. Of America’s age cohorts, the under-30 bunch is the least likely to be employed, and the most likely to work at low-wage or part-time jobs.
Millennials already pay high payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare coverage for the elderly. Yet most economists predict that both programs will soon prove insolvent and will not be able to extend the present level of benefits to young contributors when they retire.
We are currently in the greatest economic slowdown since the Great Depression. The now normal 7 percent unemployment hits the young especially hard. Their jobless rate typically ranges from two to three times higher than the national average. Requiring employers to provide Obamacare coverage will spike unemployment and, again, do the most harm to those who are just entering the workforce.
Young people in America owe in aggregate about $1 trillion in unpaid student loans. While some of their interest rates are subsidized, many are not and range from 5 percent to 9 percent at a time when mortgages can still be had for about 4 percent.
Another day, another bomb discovered in ObamaCare.
Today, yet another ”fix,” coming out of Obama’s mouth.
This one another of his unworkable fixes.
He wants cancelled people to be allowed to buy old-type ”inferior,” ”bad apple,” ”sub-par,” plans that no insurers have on the market anymore.
I know insurers thought, ”we’re going to be unbelievably rich,” when they thought ObamaCare was going to make everyone carry coverage.
But when are they going to realize how far under Obama’s bus they already are?
Obama could care less about THEIR situation.
In fact, every ”fix” Obama comes up with destroys more insurers.
This one could be the final death knoll.
Or, maybe some will hang on until the next one….
You gotta love the blackmail, too.
Obey my ”fix,” or you cannot be on the exchanges next year! – Obama.
Edited to add:
Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky has already told us why: it is a slow but sure way accomplish the left’s Holy Grail goal: “put the private insurance industry out of business” and impose a de facto single-payer, completely government-controlled regime on the entire nation.
Tom Blumer:
The insurance companies may continue to exist for a while for appearances’ sake, but they will be firmly under the government’s boot, perhaps in relatively short order. http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacare-chaos-strategy/?singlepage=true