John on Obamacare wrote:
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Obama's health plan called for employer mandates, individual mandates, a working federal health care marketplace, and integration of all health records in the country into the IRS's data bases. None of these things has been implemented yet, and most will probably never be implemented. In just this past week alone, close Obama advisor Robert Gibbs sent out a trial balloon, saying in a speech that the employer mandate will be killed completely:
"I don’t think the employer mandate will go into effect. It’s a small part of the law. I think it will be one of the first things to go."
Gibbs has a good sense of humor. The employer mandate is an essential core component of the law, not a small part of the law.
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And the worst is yet to come, because there's a huge bill to be paid. Those 7.1 million people, as an aggregate, will incur far more medical costs than they will pay for in premiums. This means that when the bill comes due in the next few months, the insurance companies will have to be bailed out (which is apparently permitted by the Obamacare bill), and they'll have to substantially increase insurance premiums for next year. And so far, Obamacare has simply wasted something like a trillion dollars. (See "1-Dec-13 World View -- Obamacare: 500M lines of code, $500M, only 60% completed" from last year.)
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Obama will be taking a number of victory laps over the next three years regarding Obamacare and the Media will be leading the cheers.
The Metrics will prove Obama was right.
More people will be covered by health insurance using the traditional metrics everyone has used for measuring coverage before Obamacare.
Medical costs will be down using the traditional metrics everyone used before Obamacare.
Even the insurance premium costs for the second and third year of Obamacare will decrease from the first year of Obamacare.
Contrary to the predictions of John and others.
The individual mandate and the employer mandate were redundant, and the employer mandate unnecessary to achieve the political goals Obama wants to achieve.
Obama-care compliant insurance policies truly does reduce per capita health care costs for all third party payers. Third party payers include Employers, Insurance companies, state governments ( Medicaid), the Federal government ( Medicaid and Obamacare market place subsidies ) and insurance companies.
Only the costs of such third party payers have been tracked in the past, so these will be the metrics that will be used to prove how well Obama-care has preformed.
The only people who will see increased health care costs are people who become sick or injured while covered by an Obamacare compliant health insurance policy.
These metrics have not been tracked in the past and Obama will not start tracking them now. So they will remain anecdotal opinions, not statistics.
Without an employer mandate the incentive to terminate company sponsored health insurance plans and dump employees on the Obamacare exchanges - or Medicaid - will be huge. That will help all the metrics. Higher exchange enrollment and the higher costs for subsidies will be trumpeted as proof of how popular Obamacare is.
Individuals who sign up for health insurance and pay one premium will be counted as enrolled in health care for the year. Those who only have health care for one month will be treated the same in the metrics as those who pay for each and every month, for 12 months.
The mentally ill on the streets and prisoners in state and federal prisons will be enrolled in expanded Medicaid plans, pushing up the metrics of those with insurance.
For companies that want to continue providing health care to employees, even without employer mandates, there will be both mandatory and voluntary reasons for converting from traditional employer insurance policies to Obamacare compliant policies. As with individual market plans, any employer plan that changes anything is required to be replaced with an Obamacare compliant policies. Employers also save tons of money by converting to Obamacare policies with government set standards for deductibles, co-pays, coinsurance, maximum annual out of pocket, and strict limits on which services are preventive and which are subject to high co-pays and and high co-insurance. When employees become sick or injured the employer will be paying a small fraction of what they paid under the old traditional plans.
The metric for transitioning to Obamacare plans, from traditional plans, will be much greater than originally projected. Traditional, non-Obamacare compliant employer plans ( grandfathered plans ) will disappear from the market place much faster than projected.
The insurance companies who wrote the regulations that shifted the costs from third party payers to sick or injured patients, also greatly jacked up the premiums for the first year of Obamacare anticipating the worse possible case. Exactly the opposite has happened. Patients have signed up and paid for Obamacare policies and then had months worth of services denied, cancer drugs not covered at all because they were not Obamacare approved drugs, and all the other things related to "working the kinks out" that will make the premiums high, claims paid small, and the net profits of Obamacare insurance plans huge the first year.
Federal government revenue from Obamacare related taxes will sky rocket above projections. Due to far more Obama-care compliant policies ( from employers voluntarily switching their employees to Obama-care compliant policies ) and the per policy taxes/fees generating far more revenue than projected.
Employees, and employees dependents, voluntarily dumped on to the exchanges by employers will sit Obama's political purposes, and make the Obama-Care private insurance market appear vastly more popular than expected.
Excess profit taxes on insurance companies will spike revenue.
Obama-care will do huge damage to the economy, but the metrics will not measure that.