The Nation Will Reexamine Obamacare

...November 2014 will be different. By then:

People in their twenties and thirties will be clobbered with 100% or higher premium hikes, insurers report. Nineteen percent of the president’s 2012 voters came from this age group.

Workers in retail, hospitality, and home care will lose on-the- job coverage and, in some cases, their full time status, forecasts the ADP Research Institute. The law mandates that employers with 50 or more full- time workers provide an “essential benefit package” that costs about twice what these industries currently offer. Employers will drop coverage. Even the government’s actuaries admit fewer people will get coverage at work after the employer mandate goes into effect than if the law had not passed.

Employers will be struggling to determine what “affordable” means, how to calculate “full time” workforce, and how to pay the $65 fee for each worker and worker’s dependents.

Seniors needing hospital care will be shocked at cutbacks. Section 3000A of the law awards bonus points to the hospitals that spend the least per senior. Hospitals are even whacked for what Medicare patients consume in the 30 days after discharge, including physical therapy.

Hospital patients of all ages will wait longer for a nurse. Cuts to Medicare pay for over half the law, and this will mean $247 billion less for hospitals over the next decade, forcing them to operate under scarcity.

Consumers directed to a state exchange will worry about handing their Social Security number and 15 pages of financial and family information to exchange “assisters,” temporary workers often from community organizations. Civil rights activists in California are resisting background checks for “assisters” because it would disqualify too many minority men with prior convictions.

In politics, twenty months is an eternity. But barring a transformational event, voters will pull the lever against Obamacare in 2014.


http://spectator.org/archives/2013/03/21/the-nation-will-reexamine-obam