No, please, say it isn’t so. Barry, and the Democrats, couldn’t have been lying all those many months when they were telling us just how great Obamacare was going to be. Or while they were telling how much money it was going save us or how many more millions of people it was going to allow to obtain health insurance. They just couldn’t have been lying, could they? Well, folks, the longer this debacle goes on, the more we’re all going to be finding out that it just ain’t cracked up to what we were all told that it was going to be. In short, yes, we were lied to! We were sold a bill of goods.
Even with the federal tax breaks and many subsidies that were promised under Obamacare, many consumers will have the unpleasant experience of finding that their out-of-pocket expenses will likely be higher, much higher, than what they have been lead to expect. And that little bit of bad news comes to us by way of an analysis of the healthcare law's problems. Consumers can benefit from two different subsidies, writes Forbes contributor and physician Scott Gottlieb, who, it just so happens, also serves as a Republican appointee on a federal health policy committee.
Premium tax credits, based on a family’s income, are designed to offset the overall costs of health insurance plans, while cost-sharing subsidies help pay with out-of-pocket expenses and help to lower costs when catastrophic limits kick in. But so far, the many, so-called, technical glitches on the website have caused miscalculations of cost estimates for uninsured individuals and families trying to sign up, leading to mass confusion and fears that the costs may end up not being as affordable as promised, Gottlieb noted. What we’re now seeing is just the tip of the Obamacare iceberg.
Part of the problem, Gottlieb wrote, stems from the fact that the Healthcare.gov website cannot communicate correctly with other federal and state agencies in order to share the data needed to help calculate costs. Data sharing with other agencies has proven too much for this wonderfully designed website to handle, leading to all sorts of errors in cost calculations on enrollment applications that have gone through. In many cases, the system simply crashed on some applicants as they tried to calculate costs. Who is surprised by any of this?
Gottlieb also notes that the subsidy to cover out-of-pocket costs are exempt from sequester cuts and could reduce the amount of money available to help offset co-pays or other medical costs not covered. For many, that could mean that a subsidy they were hoping to use to pay a medical bill may not be there when the time comes. Barry’s team calculates that subsidies over the next 10 years could cost roughly $149 Billion. But if those subsidies are in fact cut, under the law, insurance plans could be forced to absorb the shortfalls. Not a good idea, said Gottlieb.
Not a good idea because of the fact that many insurance companies have already been burned, some rather badly, by the badly bungled rollout of the federal healthcare program. "Given the failed launch of Obamacare, many insurers will be looking at far lower enrollment numbers, and losses on their new exchange health plans," said Gottlieb. If that happens, he added, many health plans will likely be pulled from the marketplace, and Obamacare could fail fast unless Barry sees fit to do some lobbying of Congress in order to stop sequester cuts from hitting cost-sharing subsidies.
Now the bottom line here is that there is absolutely no one who can claim that they weren’t warned about just how bad this thing was likely to get. And we’re now seeing that those warnings, as dire as they were, didn’t even begin to paint an accurate picture of just how bad it actually is. And it would appear that many folks chose to either ignore completely the warnings that were being sounded, or simply chose not to believe them, choosing, instead, to trust that the Democrats, Barry included, were telling the truth. Which, of course, brings us to where we are today.
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