RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anchor Insurance has announced that it will not offer insurance plans on the Ohio ObamaCare exchange next year, leaving 20 counties without any subsidized insurance options.

Regarding the Anthem departure, the New York Times breezily dismisses the fact that

Although [Anthem’s] departure would leave a small number of people — roughly 10,500 who live in about a fifth of the state’s counties — without an insurance carrier, the move was seized on by Republicans as more evidence that the markets are ‘collapsing’ under the Affordable Care Act.

Don’t you just love the satirical use of the quotations marks around the word collapsing indicating that such a charge is just utter nonsense?

Consequently, when Americans relate their horrific experiences under ObamaCare, they are met with insensitive, foul-mouthed responses and threats of violence for daring to expose the built-in problems of ObamaCare. Michelle Malkin relates how “millions of us who wanted our individual market health insurance plans left alone were branded selfish or liars for the past eight years. Our stories were stifled; our cancellation notices derided; our accounts of skyrocketing health insurance costs and diminished access to doctors mocked.” In fact, “[t]he partisan Beltway press shot down true stories of government-engineered pain and suffering, while hyping countless tall tales spun by the Obamacare Fable Factory.”

John Hayward asserts that Obama “needed to conceal how many people would lose their insurance under his plan. Millions of people lost their insurance plans because of the Affordable Care Act. Quite a few people have lost more than one insurance plan because of Obamacare-related disruptions to the market since 2010.” Moreover, “[i]t matters very much that Obamacare is absurdly expensive and wasteful. That’s real money being siphoned from our productive private economy and thrown around by the bureaucracy. A repeal plan that saves American taxpayers billions of dollars is a good thing and should be promoted to the people who pay all those taxes, insurance premiums, and deductibles as such.”

In addition, physician organizations now predict that in a mere 13 years, there will be a near-catastrophic shortage of primary care doctors and specialists in the United States. Kevin Campbell explains that:

Based on a new report from the Association of American Medical Colleges, it is expected that we will see a shortfall of nearly 100,000 doctors by the year 2030. A closer look at the predictions show that we will have a shortage of 40,000 primary care physicians, as well as a shortage of nearly 60,000 physicians in specialties such as allergy and immunology, cardiology, gastroenterology, and infectious disease. In general surgery, the report predicts that there will be 30,000 fewer surgeons than are needed to provide care to those who need it.

But, rest assured that “all federal employees could see a better rate on their health insurance premiums under a bill to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service, according to an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.” Eric Katz reports that:

A key component of the 2017 Postal Service Reform Act would be the creation of a new health benefits program just for postal employees and retirees, while also requiring all eligible annuitants to enroll in Medicare as their primary provider. Federal workers remaining in their current Federal Employees Health Benefits plans would see their costs shrink, as removing postal employees — who are generally costlier to insure than the rest of the federal workforce — from their pools would decrease the overall expenses associated with their insurance. CBO did not estimate the savings FEHB enrollees would themselves receive, but it did predict the government’s portion of premium costs would decrease by $1.4 billion for federal retirees and $1.9 billion for current employees over 10 years.

Analysts also predicted premiums in the new system ‘for postal employees and annuitants would be lower than the FEHB premiums those people would face under current law.’ Again, CBO did not project savings for the individual, but said USPS would save $2.2 billion for current postal workers and $2.5 billion over 10 years under the postal-specific health care program.

And while America waits and waits and waits for the repeal and replacement of ObamaCare, the Democrats continue their pre-existing condition scam, claiming that those people with pre-existing conditions will have no insurance protection. Betsy McCaughey exposes this falsehood when she writes that:

…the remaining 4% — those with pre-existing conditions — will be protected by a federal fund to subsidize their insurance costs. They won’t get priced out of the market, because the fund will pay the lion’s share of their premiums.

Yet, Republicans are “cowed by the media’s false reports that the GOP is abandoning people with pre-existing conditions.” McCaughey explains that:

There is a consensus that people with pre-existing conditions should be able to get insurance. The issue is who pays the hefty price tag. ObamaCare forced healthy buyers in the individual market to foot the entire bill. That’s why their premiums have doubled since the law went into effect.

The new House bill sets up a fairer way: a $130 billion pot of money, federally funded, to pay for people with pre-existing conditions. The entire nation chips in, not just people stuck in the individual market.

Under ObamaCare, the healthy and the chronically ill paid the same premiums. It’s called community pricing. Healthy people would never meet their sky-high deductibles. Instead the premiums extorted from them would be used to cover huge medical bills for the chronically ill, who consume 10 times as much medical care.

In fact, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini reports that less than 5 percent of ObamaCare enrollees consume over half of the health care.

Naysayers claim the federal fund to subsidize people with pre-existing conditions won’t be adequate. Nonsense.

How many people will need help? Not as many as Democrats claim. Before ObamaCare, 250,000 people a year with pre-existing conditions were denied coverage for health reasons by major insurers. In 2010, when the ACA established a temporary program for people not being served by state high-risk programs, another 115,000 got help. Adding the two figures together, count on 365,000 people to need help paying for their premiums because of their medical histories. To be safe, call it 400,000.

In fact,

. . . several states — Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho and Oklahoma among them — have already acted, without waiting for Congress. They used state funds to help cover the sickest people, and relieve pressure on healthy premium payers. Alaska averted a 40 percent premium hike that way last year.

Hayward asserts that, ultimately

“…the GOP [needs to] focus on giving its voters what they want, instead of worrying about tantrums from the people who lost the last election? Why make deals to appease an opposition that cannot be appeased? Republican strategists should be able to learn a lot by studying the last repeal battle. It should be easy to anticipate Democrat and media lines of attack against a bold repeal plan. Be ready for those attacks with sharp responses, focused on selling the GOP plan to voters who clearly believe Obamacare isn’t the best way to handle health insurance. Be prepared to shoot down misleading factoids and relentlessly hammer everything people don’t like about the post-ACA insurance landscape.”

Indeed.