TJKMO Loc: Bicycle Heaven

More than 21 million people signed up for health care during open enrollment. That’s an all-time record, and it’s thanks to the hard work of the Biden Administration.

The Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and it’s helping millions of people get the health care they need. Let’s keep expanding it and making it more affordable for generations to come.

Liberty Tree

Millions of these were forced to enroll because they lost Medicaid coverage. Just once can you tell the whole truth.

David L Loc: Central Wisconsin

You are missing a very important part of the health care scene. Hospitals are having a very hard time getting enough qualified Doctors and Nurses. Health care facilities are cutting services and some are simply giving up and closing their doors. This was predicted by myself and anyone who actually read the Affordable Care Act. I did. Did you?

Many predicted precisely what is going on right now. Anyone who was considering the many years of college and many thousands of dollars that it takes to be a Doctor or Nurse, took a look at the red tape and foolishness involved in Obamacare, and said no thank you. We will use our time and money for some other vocation.

Hospitals actively recruited Doctors from just about every country in the world, and some were very good, but many are not and now it is all coming to a head.

So brag and pontificate all you want, but reality is hitting us hard.

TJKMO Loc: Bicycle Heaven

I posted the TRUTH.
You posted CONJECTURE.
Show the numbers.

FallenOak Loc: St George Utah

In a historical sense it is not possible to evaluate such a change in only a very few years. Read the history books one hundred years from now and then know the true judgement of Obama Care. It is hurting many people right now and will be judged in one hundred years as another failure of social engineering.

BIRDMAN

Country must be doing great if 21 million people signed up for free healthcare

David L Loc: Central Wisconsin

You posted numbers, but failed to even consider the amount of misery and destruction brought on by Obamacare.

For example, a dear friend of mine, self-employed, and had a very good AFFORDABLE health insurance. He got cancelled because his plan did not meet Obama's "standards." It has been an expensive nightmare ever since. My daughter and her husband, also self-employed, are going through the same VERY expensive mess for far worse health care than they had before.

SO, if you were a thoughtful decent, patriotic American, you would do the right thing and face reality.

David L Loc: Central Wisconsin

Oak, you are right of course on both counts. Obamacare is already hurting many innocent hard working people and a hundred years from now honest people will say, "What WERE they thinking?" But they are already saying that.

Liberty Tree

I posted facts, look it up yourself. How do we know your numbers are not made up?

DASHY

You raise a good point. Experts in the healthcare field say an aging population, an aging healthcare workforce and workers leaving due to burnout are driving the shortage of healthcare workers. This problem needs to be addressed. It cannot be solved by reducing the number of people who need health care, or eliminating a large number of poor people from the system altogether.

BIRDMAN

Sybil

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

to be another socialist mandate for redistribution of wealth.
SCOTUS ruled it as a "tax".

Why should a single, 25 year old man have to pay for abortions?
Why can't each individual and family tailor their healthcare coverage for their specific health needs?

What about

Obamacare: Impact on the Economy
Authors: Guinevere Nell and Karen Campbell

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the health care bill signed into law by President Obama in March, will overhaul the current health insurance system by enforcing mandates on individuals and businesses, expanding Medicaid, and introducing new taxes and fines to help pay for the increased “federal budgetary commitment to health care.”

Contrary to a key intention of the legislation, the combination of mandates and taxes will not help to reduce the deficit. In fact, the PPACA will likely increase the deficit by an average $75 billion per year, and as a result, the nation’s publicly held debt will be $753 billion higher at the end of 2020. Such astronomical debt crowds out other productive investments and will lead to an estimated 670,000 lost job opportunities per year.

Dynamic Analysis Confirms Fears

It was the goal of health care reform to be deficit neutral—as scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—within the first 10 years of enactment. In order to achieve this goal, the new law immediately imposes a combination of new taxes on high-income individuals, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals and Medicare spending cuts. In addition, the PPACA delays subsidy payments to help make insurance affordable for those with lower incomes and Medicaid expansions to cover more of the uninsured.

However, the static budget analysis is limited in that it does not account for how the policy combination of spending and taxes alters the macroeconomic performance of the economy and feeds back onto the budget. A dynamic simulation shows that the higher initial costs are not an investment that pays off with a higher return in later years. Indeed, these front-loaded costs slow economic growth with higher inflation and higher interest rates, which overwhelm the benefits the proposal hoped to gain in later years.

The bill’s taxes, penalties, and fees on investors and businesses will decrease the amount of investment in the economy. This reduced investment will in turn lead to a decline in productivity, causing the economy to produce $706 billion less worth of goods and services. A smaller economic pie means that workers earn lower wages and salaries. Higher taxes on investment also put upward pressure on interest rates as investors seek to achieve their after-tax desired rate of return.[1]

Lower wages reduce the amount of taxable income that could otherwise have been achieved. This will both increase the deficit and grow the total debt—which in turn puts upward pressure on interest rates and crowds out some savings that could have gone to new productive business investments.

Higher interest rates mean that more American tax dollars will go toward paying the interest on the federal debt rather than paying down the principal. Simulations using dynamic analysis estimate that the government would spend an average $23 billion more per year on interest rate payments over the 2010–2020 year window than it would without the PPACA.

Once the government begins paying for health insurance for individuals through subsidies and bringing people into the government insurance programs in the latter half of the decade, this growing debt will balloon. By the end of the 10 years, debt held by the public will be $753 billion higher than it otherwise would have been.

Higher Premiums

In its analysis of the PPACA, the CBO estimates that health insurance premiums for the non-group market will increase significantly, primarily because of a mandate requiring plans to provide a more generous level of coverage than most do now while virtually eliminating the option of catastrophic coverage. In addition, significantly more individuals will face these higher premiums after the creation of the insurance exchanges begins crowding out the employer-sponsored market and after the individual mandate begins prodding the currently uninsured into buying coverage.[2] The result will be an overall increase in the absolute amount of health spending on premiums (that is, private and public).

The premium and medical spending increases put upward pressure on prices. Thus nominal spending (i.e., the actual dollars spent) that the government anticipates in subsides and payments for increased Medicaid enrollees will actually purchase a lower level of medical care. In turn, the government will have to spend more money to provide adequate insurance to individuals or further ration payments to medical providers. This unanticipated increase in spending further widens the deficit that contributes to the federal debt.

The dynamic analysis shows that the new law will result in 670,000 net job losses, many of which would be in the health services industry. These losses represent both cutbacks in jobs and jobs that are simply never created as talented individuals choose to specialize in other industries that are not subject to the government’s payment squeezes. At the same time, newly enrolled and subsidized individuals on the government’s rolls will cause the demand for health services to increase. In turn, prices will rise even more than anticipated, and greater rationing will occur. Thus, this legislation will fail to meet its primary goal: to enable greater access to health care while “bending the cost curve downward.”

Taxing the Job Creators

The PPACA also increases the Medicare hospital insurance component of the payroll tax on wages and self-employment income in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 joint) by 0.9 percentage points—a provision that will raise around $18 billion per year. This “tax on the rich,” however, will actually affect small businesses as well as salary earners, because the hospital insurance tax applies to “flow-through income” of those small businesses that file taxes as individuals. In fact, almost $16 billion out the total $18 billion of revenue will come from filers with at least some flow-through income. Small businesses at all earning levels that file individually—even those already facing losses—will see a tax increase.

In a time when firms are making hard decisions about layoffs, successful businesses could face tax increases of thousands of dollars. The overall average tax increase faced by small businesses filing individually would be about $600.

Repeal Is Needed

Mandates add rigidities to the economy, which in turn reduce the ability of the economy to make the needed adjustments to ever-changing economic conditions. These inflexibilities reduce economic growth by stifling the new innovations that a dynamic population demands, resulting in slower economic growth, longer periods of unemployment, and reduced opportunities for savings and investment used to build nest eggs for households.

A combination of mandates and taxes will not reduce health care costs or ensure that all citizens have good access to health care. Instead, mandates will burden already struggling businesses with new costs and punish individuals for not having high-paying jobs. New taxes will burden small businesses as well as large ones and force many firms to make layoffs, further hurting workers. The best way to prevent further erosion of the economy is to repeal the new law.

TJKMO Loc: Bicycle Heaven

My brother in law is the OBAMACARE director at a hospital.

There was no problem with healthcare staffing until COVID.
OBAMACARE preceded that by 10 years.

Threats by MAGA caused many to get out of the profession.

Your swami does not beat the Reality on the ground.

Weasel Loc: In the Great State Of Indiana!!

Yes indeed. But I can call a docter and get appointment tomorrow without waiting in line. Humana Gold Plan RULES!

pegw

If it wasn't for Obama care, I wouldn't have been offered health insurance by the last company I worked for. Insurance is a really good thing. We should go further. Health care for all!