Obamacare Access to fewer hospitals, fewer specialists, fewer primary doctors

Obamacare partisans last week cheered a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that purported to show access to medical care had increased since January 2014, when the Obamacare exchanges began expanding Medicaid coverage.

Using data from the Gallup Healthways Well Being survey, researchers found improvement on measures such as access to a personal physician, access to medication, and health status. One of the study’s authors claimed the “difference amounted to 11 million more adults saying they can afford their health care and 6.8 million reporting they were in good health.”

Although those numbers are probably too large, let’s assume the study is accurate. Such benefits always come with costs, costs that the Obamacare cheerleaders seldom acknowledge. Costs are more than financial: They are human, in terms of access fewer hospitals, fewer specialists, and fewer primary care physicians. That translates to fewer patients treated, and fewer lives saved.

The time period the JAMA study examines ends in the first quarter of 2015. A rough estimate suggests taxpayers have shelled out more than $60 billion thus far — the cost of exchanges subsidies and Medicaid expansion for 2014 and the first three months of this year — to achieve the health improvement found in the JAMA study.

A rough estimate suggests taxpayers have shelled out more than $60 billion so far for Obamacare, and those costs have consequences.
But those aren’t the only Obamacare costs taxpayers have incurred.

Add another $1.3 billion in federal money down the drain for the seven state exchanges — Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont — that have either shut down or had to start over.

Then there are the nonprofit health Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans, or CO-Ops, that were able to start up and compete on the exchanges thanks to an Obamacare grant program. They were intended, presumably, to offer better benefits than the for-profit insurers. In January, CoOportunity Health, which served both Iowa and Nebraska, went under.

Of the remaining 23 CO-Ops, 22 are operating in the red with no relief in sight. The cost to taxpayers for this program is $2.4 billion.

Health insurance consumers are another group bearing the burden of Obamacare. The president’s signature health care program imposed many regulations on policies sold on the exchange, from community ratings and guaranteed issue, to medical loss ratios and essential benefit mandates. This has resulted in higher premiums, less choice, and poorer quality for insurance consumers.

http://www.lifezette.com/healthzette/obamacare-can-kill-you/