Don's Tuesday column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   11/05/2013

Obama: If I like it, you can keep it

Tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting will host Assembly candidate Ryan Schohr.

Let’s start off with what can happen right here in Tehama County, regarding Obamacare. I won’t use its formal title, the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or ACA),” because we now know that patients’ health insurance plans, providers, doctors, choices and personal information are emphatically NOT protected. Moreover, due to increased costs for the law’s coverage, the higher premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are no longer affordable for many. Nor is it affordable for our federal budget (our tax dollars) if masses of people get a “subsidy” paid for by someone else.

As Lady Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Anyone cheering that federal subsidies defray the bloated cost of Obamacare-compliant insurance policies ought to consider asking any random group of taxpayers: “I’m eligible for an Obamacare subsidy; who wants to pay for it?” Liberals should keep this in mind before bloviating about everyone collectively paying for everyone else’s health care.

Locally, there may be hundreds of people getting letters from their insurance companies notifying them that their prior coverage, like it or not, is being cancelled. This illustrates President Obama’s mendacious (Webster’s: “lying or false”) statements, uttered almost 50 times over the years, about keeping the doctors and health care plans you like—period! The cancellation of individual policies is reality; anyone going through the opposite of “keeping your plan” might write the editor describing their experience.

National Review, 10/25, told readers, “San Francisco columnist Debra J. Saunders has learned that at least 500,000 Californians may lose their health insurance next year—and that’s a conservative estimate.” Saunders: “as of December 2012, there were 491,977 covered lives in individual health care plans regulated by the state Department [of] Insurance that are not grandfathered under the ACA.” From Kaiser health news (“Thousands Of Consumers Get Insurance Cancellation Notices Due to Health Law”): “Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who what to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies (because they) fall short of what the ACA requires starting Jan. 1.”

State and local insurance cancellations can be multiplied by a factor of 10 or 20 for a nationwide picture of so-called “health care reform”. Obamacare defenders and ideological hacks dismiss many, many millions of people as “a small percentage.” Health policy expert Bob Laszewski explained that “the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent … (that) 16 million are not grandfathered…(their) plans will no longer be available … Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.”

“Obamacare’s winners and losers in Bay Area” by Tracy Seipel (San Jose Mercury News, 10/16), told of “Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura, big believers in the Affordable Care Act (whose votes) helped elect and reelect President Barack Obama … (T)hey were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law. Vinson, of San Jose, will pay $1,800 more a year for an individual policy, while Waschura, of Portola Valley, will cough up almost $10,000 more for insurance for his family of four … In California, 1.9 million people buy plans on the open market…and many of them are steaming mad.”

In “Sticker Shock Often Follows Insurance Cancellation,” Nov. 2, AP reporter Kelli Kennedy wrote of how Dean Griffin liked the health insurance “he purchased for himself and his wife three years ago and thought he’d be able to keep the plan even after” the ACA took effect. However, it “was being cancelled because it didn’t cover certain benefits required under the law.” They’ll be forced off a $770/month plan with a $2,500 deductible and the cheapest Obamacare-compliant plan will charge them $1,275/month and have a $12,700 deductible, and will only cover providers in Pennsylvania.

Since they live on the state border near Delaware they won’t be able to see the doctors they’ve used for more than a decade. “We’re buying insurance that we will never use and can’t possibly ever benefit from. We’re basically passing on a benefit to other people who are not otherwise able to buy basic insurance,” said Griffin, retired and 64.

Understandably, healthy people may well 1) ignore the Obamacare mandated insurance exchanges, 2) adjust their withholding to make sure they owe something in taxes each April, leaving the IRS unable to collect the “tax,” for which there are no penalties in the law, and 3) buy a high-deductible, catastrophic, major-medical policy. They’ll spend the rest on things important to them—it’s called freedom of economic choice; liberals detest that.

Regarding security, Consumer Reports advised against using the web exchanges. Bad data has been given to agents about enrollees; one Justin Hadley (per the Weekly Standard), received “eligibility letters” addressed to other people—in other states—with personal information. Even the AP ferreted out a document from the CMS showing concern that a lack of testing posed a potentially “high” security risk for the HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states. “If they (security issues) cannot be resolved, they could prove to be more serious than the long list of technical problems the administration is trying to address.”