There are plenty of new taxes, fees, programs, and bureaucracies formed on a nearly daily basis thanks to ObamaCare. There will be nearly seventy new grant programs, six regulatory agencies, 50 bureaucratic entities, 30 pilot programs, and a dozen or so entitlements and compliance standards. This is great news if you are a lifetime government employee or union member, it’s called job security. For the rest of us it’s called higher taxes.
Imagine trying to get the ball rolling on such a huge undertaking, it would be almost impossible in any amount of time. So the Obama administration came up with the idea of giving all authority to Kathy Sebelius of the HHS, making all decisions on how to do so, none of which can be challenged in court. Donald Berwick of Medicare got the same deal as lord of all seniors and their health care. Mr. Berwick loves socialized medicine, he praises it every chance he gets. Now he gets to create his own vision of health care for seniors, unchallenged, rationing care along the way. The law gives absolute power to these government employees in deciding how, when, and how much care is given. What the law does to you is considerably worse.
120 million citizens will likely have to change their health insurance coverage by 2013. The employer group plan will have lost it’s grandfathered status by then and will have to comply with Obama’s mandates. So much for keeping your plan if you like it. Mandates mean more money. Many families will see rate increases of $2000 a year or more.
More than half of the 30 million newly insured will be insured through Medicaid, the program that doctors are dropping out of in droves as we speak. Having insurance certainly won’t guarantee receiving care.
As bad as all of this sounds, it will be the elderly that will be hurt the most. With major cuts to Medicare funding on the horizon, and thousands of doctors already refusing to take medicare patients due to low reimbursement rates, the one segment that needs care the most will receive the least.
Michael Higgins
602.405.8769