Another ACA Hangover
When I’m not busy forwarding “ABFM Certification Reminders” to my junk folder, I catch glimpses of what is going on in the larger picture. If one can forget for a moment all the fashionable hysteria du jour (especially the COVID “head cold” variant), and get around to paying bills, the ever-growing health insurance premium slaps us in the face monthly.
Some smart people have written about how financing has altered peoples’ attitudes about, and expectations from health “care” and those that actually, decreasingly provide it. Our own Ken Fisher, MD has written a great round up on this which if you haven’t read, you should. Likewise, Keith Jackson, MD has a great piece on American Thinker that provides additional narrative about how this all ended up in the bottom half of the economic Port-O-let.
Leave it to U.S. doctors to be arrogant enough to demand that others pay for their good wishes, then accept a system that would enslave them after entrapping them within their own moral piety. That is what this profession did in 1965, and to a great extent in 1997 and 2010. Instead of recognizing that the system as cobbled was absolutely, obviously unsustainable, far too many doctors supported adding on even more burdens, leading to more grandiose expectations made all the more unrealistic by the additional regulatory burdens that, of course, accompanied them.
ObamaCare, uh sorry, the AFFORDABLE Care Act was a marvel of mendacity, a con that the frightened and ignorant public was led into by nervous doctors, greedy politicians, and salivating insurance companies. No group escaped the guilt of putting this pig of a program into action.
So COVID came and went, leaving enough destruction and (rightfully) destroyed credibility to last for a generation, but wait (!) – like a bad, bad drunk on Aristocrat vodka and pineapple liqueur, it left us two years later with cat piss in our eyes, fur on our tongue, a really bad smell in the apartment, a stack of unpaid bills, and the same old problems we had before Fauci started renting Pangolin porn. Health (ahem) “care” is still more expensive by the quarter, with premiums going up across the board. And now the government subsidies for ACA are set to run out, which will jack up costs for 13 million recipients if Congress doesn’t spasm itself into an emergency fix. So, like Medicare, the geniuses in the federal government came up with another program so fantastic, so compassionate, so smart, so beloved and neeeeeeeded, that it was financially unsound out of the gate and will have to be propped up forever. In the way that the FDA recommending the tenth booster must make Pfizer and Moderna swoon, in the way that a hilariously idiotic “student loan bailout” will make universities giddy like debutantes on prom night, the statutory encasement of permanent pay increases must have Big Insurance exec’s tap dancing in the aisles of their Cessna jets.
The program subsidies are tied to the larger legislation instead of a “clean bill,” and if not renewed will increase the premiums of the 13 million by 53%. Along with the rising cost of, well, everything, this will encourage even more to do without coverage altogether, and worry about the eventual IRS penalty whenever those hobnailed goons take a break from harassing the most productive and the most disagreeable. This of course is one more step down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of Single-Payer, where no one ever looks behind the curtain. You can read about it on The Hill, or the column by the delightfully acerbic John Nolte.
Will U.S. doctors ever en masse admit that Big Government solutions ALWAYS make things worse? Don’t make me laugh. By and large, this profession won’t even tell a 400-pounder with chronic knee pain that they are too damn fat, even as we write more phentermine scripts and ponder the joys of government-subsidized gastric bypasses.
In the middle phase of the Third Reich, it had sunk into the awareness of the generally well-to-do, assimilated Western European Jews that it was big-out time. The Nazi’s didn’t get so upset if they scrammed, as long as they left penniless. But it took so long to liquidate one’s assets!
Enter Adolf Eichmann, commissioner of All Matters Jewish. He set up these little stations in gymnasiums. You come with your family, bring in your bank records, property titles, portable valuables, step through the queue, and BANG! Leave with exit visas, passage tickets, and the clothes on your backs. Two hours! Now there’s a management wizard! Bon voyage, Jews!
Your money or your life has always been the preference of polite killers. It always works in health insurance. You can’t take it with you!
Shame they hanged Eichmann in Israel. He could have run an HMO.
If you haven’t seen the movie “Operation Finale”, I recommend it. All about the Mossad’s capture of that vermin.
Pat, Thank you for mentioning my essay. Ken Fisher
Just turning 65 and going on Medicare I thought I was set for some savings. Instead my wife and I know still pay$1,600 a month for Medicare coverage the higher income penalties and secondaries without deductibles. That despite paying a huge amount of money to Medicare for the past 30 years. Before I was paying $2,200 a month pre-tax now I’m paying $1,600 a month out of pocket for no savings at all despite being on medicare. Essentially we have a system that is destroying everyone in the middle that is not employed by a big corporation. The poor get theirs free and it’s a small percentage of the income of the very rich those in the 0.1%. it’s a plot to destroy small business. And interestingly enough the costs dramatically increase just above the level of a government employees pension or $91,000 a year.