And the Winner Is
And the winner is: ACA—The Affordable Care Act, frequently referred to as Obamacare.
The contest was to find the best or the worst, depending on your viewpoint, misnomer of the century. A misnomer is an inaccurate name or designation.
ACA wins that contest easily. Affordable care indicates that the legislation’s purpose was to reduce the cost of medical care so that it would be affordable for most individuals.
The act is over 2,000 pages long and there are probably very few scholars who have read every page. I am not among those few.
There may be something in that ream of paper that addresses the cost of medical care. If so, those provisions never see the light of press coverage.
The sole function of the legislation seems to be medical insurance coverage. According to Nancy Pelosi and her minions, once the act became law, everyone in the country would be covered by medical insurance without regard to whether they wanted it or believed that they needed it.
In addition, we were promised that if we liked our insurance, we could keep it; if we liked our doctor, we could keep him or her.
WRONG! The act then proceeded to specify what had to be covered in the insurance policies, that insurance companies had to accept and cover individuals with existing medical conditions, had to cover children in their parents’ policies until age 26, and that any taxpayer who did not buy medical insurance would be fined with a surtax on his income tax.
This meant that millions who did not have or want medical insurance because they did not need it or could not afford it had to buy insurance. To buy insurance they could afford, they had to buy policies with the minimum coverage required by the law and with very high deductibles in the $8,000.00 range.
For them, ACA increased the costs of their medical care. In addition to having to pay the prevailing rate for their medical care until they reached the deductible amount, they had to add the cost of their premiums. Is that “affordable care”?
The only individuals who obtained affordable care under this act are the millions who became eligible for Medicaid. As that type of care is basically free, there is no argument that they benefited from affordable care.
Typically, however, things that are free are abused by some. There are indications that some new Medicaid patients seek care for any minor cold or cut that comes along. The result is rising health care costs for those who have to pay up front with insurance or otherwise.
The only ascertainable effects of the act to make medical care affordable are the sky rocketing increases in the medical insurance rates. The rates are increasing because of the companies lading profits when they are required to insure patients they would have refused under regular practice.
Rising costs under an act entitled Affordable Care Act are typical of Washington bureaucrats. Until recently, the bureaucrats crafting rules and regulations lacked experience and knowledge of business. They seem to have no clue that the life blood of any business is profit.
This indicates that bureaucrats are also clueless that profit requires income exceeding expenses.
So here’s the perspective.
Had the drafters of ACA been honest, they would have titled their legislation The First Step Act. Pelosi and others let it slip that the ultimate goal of this legislation was to establish a single payer system. In other words, they wanted to socialize medical care in this country.
That sort of thinking illustrates again the wide gap between reality and Washington bureaucrats.
There is already socialized medicine in the U.S. It is called the Veterans Administration.
Look how the VA is operating. Do we want that as a model for furnishing medical care for the rest of us?
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