-By Warner Todd Huston
Earlier in the week President Obama was part of a conference call held to talk about his healthcare plans during which he admitted that he was uninformed about what was in the healthcare legislation he was pushing for. But even as he admitted he had no clue about provisions of the bill, he insisted that certain things will happen once it’s passed.
Once the healthcare bill that is under consideration in the House of Representatives was released, it was discovered that one part of it would force all new insurance policies to conform to the government’s public plan options or such policies would be prohibited by law. In other words, the bill would effectively eliminate private insurance as soon as the bill passed. Obama claimed he’d never heard of this provision when asked about it.
The Heritage Foundation explains:
… the House bill does not outright outlaw private individual health insurance, but it does effectively regulate it out of existence. The House bill does allow private insurance to be sold, but only “Exchange-participating health benefits plans.” In order to qualify as an ?Exchange-participating health benefits plan,? all health insurance plans must conform to a slew of new regulations, including community rating and guaranteed issue. These will all send the cost of private individual health insurance skyrocketing. Furthermore, all these new regulations would not apply just to individual insurance plans, but to all insurance plans. So the House bill will also drive up the cost of your existing employer coverage as well. Until, of course, it becomes so expensive that your company makes the perfectly economical decision to dump you into the government plan.
Call this willful ignorance on the part of the president. He doesn’t want to know that his bill will outlaw private insurance because knowing makes the lie to his claim that we can keep our insurance “if we like it.”
The fact is, few of us will be able to keep our current insurance once Obamacare passes because our employers will likely be forced to dump us all into the government plan, whether we like it or whether our employers like it or not.
Obama is simply lying to us when he says we can keep what we have if we like it and he knows it.
The Heritage Foundation also found the following:
- Approximately 103 million people would be covered under the new public plan and, as a consequence, about 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance. This would represent a 48.4 percent reduction in the number of people with private coverage.
- About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.
- Yearly premiums for the typical American with private coverage could go up by as much as $460 per privately-insured person, as a result of increased cost-shifting stemming from a public plan modeled on Medicare.
Obama may claim not to “know” any of this. But what he doesn’t know WILL hurt us all.
Finally, a slew of voices are being raised against this plan. For instance, the Mayo Clinic has said that the current debate is leading us down a road to destruction. Even the very liberal Douglas Elmendorf of the CBO is saying we are making matters worse if we implement the bills under discussion. Minority leader John Boehner (R, OH) recently said that even Democrats are so embroiled in infighting that this whole thing should be scrapped. Left, right and center, Obamacare is under assault. And there are many, many more decrying this flawed effort at “reform.”
Let’s hope that President Obama at least “knows” that much.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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