You’ve heard the claims that ObamaCare would extend insurance to millions, expand access to health care, lower insurance premiums and basically improve your pitiful little lives? It turns out that millions didn’t want it and only those who could afford health insurance pre-socialization can afford to have it now.
As reported in the NY Times, at least 20% of new enrollees in ObamaCare have not paid their first month’s premium so technically, you don’t have insurance.
For those that did manage to sign up and got dumped into Medicaid – bad news. At least 11 states are now outsourcing your privacy to foreign countries, including 9 countries that have no specific protections in law to keep your health insurance private. So for those who live in Florida, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Tennessee, you’re on your own, in more ways than one.
States that are already struggling under budget deficits from existing Medicaid programs are attempting to reduce deficits by cutting already low Medicaid reimbursement rates. Physicians reluctant to treat Medicaid patients under current rates, that are only a fraction of private and Medicare rates, will have even less interest in taking new patients at even lower reimbursement rates.
If you decided to forgo socialized medicine and pay the fine, you’re not in any better shape, except saving yourself the price of outrageous monthly insurance bills. Hospitals that treat the poor and uninsured are dependent upon federal Disproportionate Share (DSH) payments to offset the cost of caring for the uninsured. ObamaCare severely cut federal DSH payments so those hospitals will be less interested in eating the cost of treating you.
Those that somehow managed to get pass the government’s help and obtain insurance and even managed to scrap together enough money to pay their premium – Good luck finding a doctor to take it!
ObamaCare required insurers to accept every patient regardless of risk, provide expansive benefit packages and even eliminate caps on lifetime benefits but insurance companies are no dummies. To control costs, most are offering exchange plans that severely limit the number of doctors and hospitals you can visit. Some state exchanges, including New York’s, don’t even offer a plan that covers visits to out-of-network doctors or hospitals. Some specialty hospitals have been excluded from all exchange plans.
Patient choice has been further compromised by the haphazard implementation of the exchanges making it next to impossible to find out which doctors are even participating in which plan. Doctors on their part aren’t even sure which plans they are listed on and what the new reimbursement rates are. Many are finding that they’ve been excluded from plans they once participated in pre-socialization while others are discovering their name on plans they had no knowledge of.
Socialized medicine like all things Socialist has been a dismal failure worldwide. It takes our power to control our bodies and gives that power to the government and bureaucrats.
“Giving government the power to make everyone equal necessarily creates the worst form of inequality: that of master and subject. In practice under socialized medicine, those with more money and friends in the government get vastly better health care than those without power and connections.” Jarret B. Wollstein
