At year’s end, the media revisit the preceding twelve months
; the deaths, the dramas and the politics
.
.
Notably absent from
most reviews of 2012 was any mention of Obamacare. The media didn’t discuss it and
more curiously, neither did the Democrats. But Obamacare was newsworthy in 2012
and I want to give it the attention it deserves
.
The president campaigned for Obamacare while claiming (repeatedly)
it would cut family health insurance premiums by up to $2500 by the end of his
first term. This would certainly be welcome relief and Kaiser released a study
in September that measured our progress toward that goal. It indicated that
annual premiums increased, on average, $3065 between Obama’s election in
November 2008 and summer 2012. Every state expects to see rate increases of
similar scale in 2013 and 2014. Some states, like California project far higher
increases. Nowhere will premiums fall.
Proponents of Obamacare usually treat challenges to their economic
projections as akin to treason. But the numbers came into question on other
occasions in 2012. No item on the Obamacare agenda was questioned more persistently
than the financial viability of the Class Act. The Class Act was designed to
provide $50-100 per diem payments to disabled and elderly. These dollars would purchase home-based personal care services.
The president’s own debt commission recommended that it be
repealed. On October 7, 2011, Secretary of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius acknowledged
that design flaws made the program unsustainable, ultimately leading to repeal in February 2012. Sally
Pipes wrote about this program extensively and predicted this outcome.
As the year ended,
eighteen Democratic senators appealed to Senator Reid for a rescission or
postponement of the of the 2.3 percent medical device tax. It is important to
note that this is a tax applied to gross revenue, not net profit. It resembles
a sales tax. It gets collected without regard to profit profit. Opponents of
Obamacare in 2009 noted that the tax would harm competitiveness and impede
research and development, the very position Democrats now take. Yet it is only
now, after passage and before implementation, that Democrats have developed
such reservations.
No one believed that Obamacare was going to result in lower
premiums or that the Class program was financially sustainable. No one truly
believed that the medical device tax would be a windfall for manufacturers. The
tortured logic that supports this conclusion is we have created 30 million new
customers through Obamacare and the resulting revenue increases will make the tax
easy to absorb.
Politicians profess to believe things fhat they know to be untrue
to advance legislation. Later they back away without an ounce of shame. The fight
over Obamacare only ends if the Republicans phone it in.
